A report in The Caravan magazine quoted Aseemanand as saying that Bhagwat, then RSS general secretary, told him that the blasts should not be linked to the Sangh. â€œAseemanand told The Caravan that Bhagwat said of the violence, â€˜It is very important that it be done. But you should not link it to the Sanghâ€™,â€ said a press release issued by the magazine on Wednesday.

The RSS, however, denied the charge and questioned the veracity of the interview with Aseemanand, who is currently in Ambala Central Jail. â€œIt is a rubbish and concocted interview,â€ said the RSSâ€™s all-India publicity chief Manmohan Vaidya.

â€œAseemanandâ€™s lawyer has issued a statement categorically stating that the contents of the article are false, baseless and concocted. He has also said that his client denies having given any such interview,â€ claimed RSS leader Ram Madhav. Speaking to The Indian Express, he said, â€œAll the allegations are baseless. Even the authenticity of the interview is questionable. We do not want to comment on an interview, the veracity of which itself is questionable.â€

The magazine has claimed that Aseemanand gave the interviews over a series of interactions â€” the audio tapes and transcripts were made public by the publication on Wednesday. â€œOver the course of our conversations, Aseemanandâ€™s description of the plot in which he was involved became increasingly detailed. In our third and fourth interviews, he told me that his terrorist acts were sanctioned by the highest levels of the RSS â€” all the way up to Mohan Bhagwat, the current RSS chief, who was the organisationâ€™s general secretary at the time,â€ said the report.

â€œAseemanand told me about a meeting that allegedly took place in July 2005. After an RSS conclave in Surat, senior Sangh leaders including Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar, who is now on the organisationâ€™s powerful seven-member national executive council, travelled to a temple in the Dangs, Gujarat, where Aseemanand was livingâ€¦ In a tent pitched by a river several kilometres away from the temple, Bhagwat and Kumar met with Aseemanand and his accomplice Sunil Joshi (who was killed in December 2007). Joshi informed Bhagwat of a plan to bomb several Muslim targets around India.

According to Aseemanand, both RSS leaders approved, and Bhagwat told him, â€˜You can work on this with Sunil. We will not be involved, but if you are doing this, you can consider us to be with youâ€™,â€ it said.

The report said Bhagwat granted his â€œblessingsâ€ for the attacks, and requested Aseemanand to â€œplease do thisâ€. The report quoted Aseemanand as saying, â€œThen they told me, â€˜Swamiji, if you do this we will be at ease with it. Nothing wrong will happen then. Criminalisation nahin hoga (It will not be criminalised). If you do it, then people wonâ€™t say that we did a crime for the sake of committing a crime. It will be connected to the ideology. This is very important for Hindus. Please do this. You have our blessingsâ€™.â€

"SWAMIJI KO BULAO,â€ the jailer ordered. Call the Swami. Two police constables scurried out of the jailerâ€™s office and onto the grounds of the prison. A deafening noise reverberated through the room, as if a hundred men outside the walls were howling at the same time. It was visiting hours in late December 2011 at Ambalaâ€™s Central Jail.

After a few minutes, Swami Aseemanand, the Hindu firebrand accused of plotting several terrorist attacks on civilian targets across the country between 2006 and 2008, stepped into the doorway of the jailerâ€™s office. He wore a saffron dhoti and a saffron kurta that hung down to his knees. The clothes were freshly ironed. A woollen monkey cap was pulled down over his forehead, and a saffron shawl was wrapped around his neck. He looked bemused to see me. We exchanged namastes, then he ushered me through a door into an adjoining room, where clerks in white dhoti-kurtas were poring over titanic ledgers. He sat on a large wooden trunk behind the door, and instructed me to pull a chair from a nearby desk. He was informal, like a good host, and asked me about my visit. â€œSomebody has to tell your story,â€ I said.

This was the beginning of the first of four interviews I had with Aseemanand over more than two years . He is currently under trial on charges including murder, attempt to murder, criminal conspiracy and sedition, in connection with three bombings in which at least 82 people were killed. He could also be tried for two other blast cases; he has been named in the chargesheets, but not yet formally accused. Together, the five attacks killed 119 people, and worked as a corrosive on the bonds of Indian society. If convicted, Aseemanand may face the death penalty.

In the course of our conversations, Aseemanand became increasingly warm and open. The story he told of his life was remarkable and haunting. He is fiercely proud of the acts of violence he has committed and the principles by which he has lived. For more than four decades, he has loyally promoted Hindu nationalism; during much of that time, he worked under the banner of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sanghâ€™s tribal affairs wing, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA), spreading the Sanghâ€™s version of Hinduism, and its vision for a Hindu Rashtra. Through all this, Aseemanand, who is now in his early sixties, has never diluted the intensity of his beliefs.

After the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, Nathuram Godse and his accomplice Narayan Apte were executed by hanging and cremated at the Ambala jail, in 1949. Their co-conspirator, Godseâ€™s brother Gopal, was sentenced to 18 yearsâ€™ imprisonment. â€œIâ€™m kept in the same cell as Gopal Godse,â€ Aseemanand proudly told me. Today, Aseemanand is perhaps the most prominent face of Hindu extremist terrorism. Journalists who met him in the years before the bombings described him to me as an extraordinarily arrogant and intolerant man. What I saw in the dark records room of the jail was a man subdued by his imprisonment, but void of remorse. â€œWhatever happens to me, itâ€™s a good thing for Hindus,â€ Aseemanand told me. â€œLogon me Hindutva ka bhaav aayegaâ€â€”it will stir Hindutva among the people.

ON THE NIGHT OF 18 FEBRUARY 2007, the Samjhauta Express started on its usual course from platform 18 of the Delhi Junction railway station. The Samjhauta, also known as the â€œFriendship Expressâ€, is one of only two rail links between India and Pakistan. That night, almost three-quarters of its roughly 750 passengers were Pakistanis returning home. A few minutes before midnightâ€”an hour after the train started its journeyâ€”improvised explosive devices (IEDs) detonated in two unreserved compartments of the 16-coach train. Barrelling through the night, the train was now on fire.

The explosions fused shut the compartmentsâ€™ exits, sealing passengers inside. â€œIt was awful,â€ a railways inspector told the Hindustan Times. â€œBurnt and half burnt bodies of the passengers were all over in the coaches.â€ Two unexploded IEDs packed into suitcases were later discovered at the scene; the devices contained a mixture of chemicals including PETN, TNT, RDX, petrol, diesel and kerosene. Sixty-eight people died in the attack.

This was the second, and deadliest, of the five attacks in which Aseemanand is implicated. He is now accused number one in the Samjhauta train blasts; accused number three in a bombing at Hyderabadâ€™s Mecca Masjid that killed 11 people, in May 2007; and accused number six in a blast at the dargah in Ajmer, Rajasthan, that killed three people, in October 2007. He is also named, but not yet charged, in two attacks in Malegaon, Maharashtra, in September 2006 and September 2008, that together took the lives of 37 people.

Many of these cases have been investigated by multiple agencies at different points in timeâ€”including the Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), the Rajasthan ATS, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and the National Investigation Agency (NIA). At least a dozen chargesheets have been filed in the five cases. Thirty-one people have been formally accused, and two of Aseemanandâ€™s close associates are among themâ€”Pragya Singh Thakur, who was a national executive member of the BJPâ€™s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP); and Sunil Joshi, who was a former RSS district leader in Indore. All of the investigative agencies determined that Aseemanand played a central role in plotting the attacks. Aseemanand, by his own account, hosted planning sessions, selected targets, provided funds for the construction of IEDs, and sheltered and otherwise aided those who planted the bombs.

In December 2010 and January 2011, Aseemanand made two judicial confessions, to courts in Delhi and Haryana, in which he admitted to planning the attacks. At the time of his confessions, Aseemanand refused legal representation. He spent 48 hours in judicial custody, insulated from investigating agencies, before making each statement, thereby giving him an opportunity to change his mind. Both times, Aseemanand resolved to confess, and had his statements recorded in court. His confessions, and the confessions of at least two of his fellow conspirators, allege that the attacks were planned with the knowledge of at least one senior member of the RSS.

On 28 March 2011, Aseemanand accepted legal representation. The next day, he retracted his confessions, claiming that they were coerced by torture. An application he submitted before the trial court read, â€œthe leak of Aseemanandâ€™s alleged confession to the media, which is shocking and deliberate, is a part of the design to politicise and hype the case, conduct and conclude a media trial, and to create, at the global level, the notion of Hindu terror for the political purposes of the ruling party.â€ Aseemanand and several of the defence lawyers working on the Samjhauta case told me that the lawyers are all members of the Sangh; one of them said that they manage the case in meetings of the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad, the RSSâ€™s legal wing.

When I interviewed him, Aseemanand denied being tortured, or that his confessions were coerced. He said that when he was arrested for the bombings, by the CBI, he decided it was â€œa good time to tell all about this. I knew I could be hanged for it, but Iâ€™m old anyway.â€

Over the course of our conversations, Aseemanandâ€™s description of the plot in which he was involved became increasingly detailed. In our third and fourth interviews, he told me that his terrorist acts were sanctioned by the highest levels of the RSSâ€”all the way up to Mohan Bhagwat, the current RSS chief, who was the organisationâ€™s general secretary at the time. Aseemanand told me that Bhagwat said of the violence, â€œItâ€™s very important that it be done. But you should not link it to the Sangh.â€

Aseemanand told me about a meeting that allegedly took place, in July 2005. After an RSS conclave in Surat, senior Sangh leaders including Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar, who is now on the organisationâ€™s powerful seven-member national executive council, travelled to a temple in the Dangs, Gujarat, where Aseemanand was livingâ€”a two-hour drive. In a tent pitched by a river several kilometres away from the temple, Bhagwat and Kumar met with Aseemanand and his accomplice Sunil Joshi. Joshi informed Bhagwat of a plan to bomb several Muslim targets around India. According to Aseemanand, both RSS leaders approved, and Bhagwat told him, â€œYou can work on this with Sunil. We will not be involved, but if you are doing this, you can consider us to be with you.â€

Aseemanand continued, â€œThen they told me, â€˜Swamiji, if you do this we will be at ease with it. Nothing wrong will happen then. Criminalisation nahin hoga (It will not be criminalised). If you do it, then people wonâ€™t say that we did a crime for the sake of committing a crime. It will be connected to the ideology. This is very important for Hindus. Please do this. You have our blessings.â€™â€

Chargesheets filed by the investigative agencies allege that Kumar provided moral and material support to the conspirators, but they donâ€™t implicate anyone as senior as Bhagwat. Although Kumar was interrogated once by the CBI, the case was later taken over by the NIA, which has not pursued the conspiracy past the level of Aseemanand and Pragya Singh. (Joshi, who was allegedly the connecting thread between several different parts of the conspiracyâ€”including those who assembled and those who planted the bombsâ€”was killed under mysterious circumstances in December 2007.)

Since allegations first emerged in late 2010 that Kumar had a role in the attacks, the RSS has closed ranks around him. Bhagwat, in an unprecedented act for an RSS sarsangh-chalak, participated in a dharna to protest the accusations against Kumar. The BJP has also defended him, and the BJP national spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi was his lawyer at the time he was named in the chargesheets. A lawyer for one of the accused told me that Kumar is â€œhighly ambitiousâ€, and â€œin waiting to be the sarsanghchalakâ€.

An officer at one of the investigating agencies, on the condition of anonymity, allowed me to inspect a secret report submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The report requested that the MHA send a show-cause notice to RSS authorities, asking why the organisation should not be banned in light of the evidence against them. The MHA has not yet acted on the recommendation.

The fear of being bannedâ€”as the organisation briefly was after the assassination of Gandhi, in 1948; during the Emergency, in 1975; and after the demolition of Babri Masjid, in 1992â€”looms over the RSS leadership. Whenever terrorist violence has been attributed to its members, the Sangh has taken a tack similar to the one they used with Nathuram Godse: there is no question of owning or disowning the perpetrators, the RSS says, because they have all previously left the Sangh, or were acting independently of the organisation, or alienated themselves from it by embracing violence.

Aseemanand poses a serious problem to the RSS in this regard. Since it was founded in 1952, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram has been in the nucleus of the Sangh family, and Aseemanand has dedicated almost his entire adult life to serving the organisation. At the time he planned the attacks, he had been the national head of the VKAâ€™s religious wingâ€”a position created especially for himâ€”for a decade. Even before the inception of the terrorist plot, organised violence (including coordinated communal riots) was a well-known part of his methods.

Bhagwat and Kumar were allegedly aware of Aseemanandâ€™s involvement in the plot by mid 2005. Aseemanand was not excommunicatedâ€”far from it. In December of that year, according to a report in Organiser, the RSSâ€™s weekly mouthpiece, he was honoured with a Rs 1 lakh award marking the birth centenary of MS Golwalkar, the RSSâ€™s second and most venerated chief; the veteran BJP leader and former party president Murli Manohar Joshi gave the ceremonyâ€™s keynote address. Even if Kumar remains insulated from a full inquiry into the allegations against him, there can be little question of the RSS convincingly denying its brotherhood with Aseemanand.

Denouncing terror attacks launched in the last decade by members of the Sangh, Swami Agnivesh, a prominent Hindu reformist, told me that the RSS â€œwill harm themselves and others of the Hindu societyâ€ through militant Hindutva. â€œIt is deplorable,â€ he said. The political scientist Jyotirmaya Sharma, who has authored three books on Hindutva, said, â€œthe RSS involves itself in both covert and overt functions. But the organisationâ€™s central premise is the sort of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare advocated by Ramdas, the guru of Shivaji. And the problem is that we donâ€™t have enough liberal institutions within the countryâ€”from political parties to even strong enough mediaâ€”to counter such acts of terror waged so blatantly in the name of Hindu religion.â€

Despite such condemnations, the Sangh has come a long way since the ignominy of 1948. Through their efforts at man-making and nation-building, the RSS and its affiliates, particularly the BJP, now seem to represent a major current in the mainstream of Indian society. Aseemanand, too, is in many ways a product of those efforts, and he shares the RSSâ€™s aimsâ€”albeit in magnified form: his vision for the future, he told me, is a global Hindu Rashtra.

[II]

ASEEMANANDâ€™S PASSIONATE BELIEF in the Hindu Rashtra, and his commitment to violence as a means of securing it, emerged from two connected but radically different streams in Indian thoughtâ€”the ecumenical karma yoga of the Ramakrishna Mission, and the Hindutva of the RSS. Aseemanand was shaped by both of these currents, and in some sense he chose to combine the ascetic life of the former with the extreme politics of the latter. This partly had to do with his early participation in a local RSS shakha, and it was also, in some measure, a rejection of the values of his father. In Aseemanandâ€™s own account, it was a sort of awakeningâ€”to Hinduism as a political force.

Aseemanand was born Naba Kumar Sarkar in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, sometime in late 1951. He is the second of seven sons of the freedom fighter Bibhutibhushan Sarkar, a Gandhian who told his children that Gandhi was his god. The village where they lived, Kamarpukur, was also the birthplace of the 19th-century sage Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, who preached â€œyato mat, tato pathâ€ (many faiths, many paths to god). Ramakrishnaâ€™s most famous disciple, Swami Vivekananda, established the Ramakrishna Mission, in 1897, to carry on the work of karma yogaâ€”service through selfless action. Aseemanand grew up around the corner from the missionâ€™s local branchâ€”a place of pilgrimage for Ramakrishna devoteesâ€”and spent many of his evenings listening to the monks there singing devotional songs.

Bibhutibhushan and his wife, Pramila, wanted their son to join the missionâ€™s holy ordersâ€”a source of pride for many devout Bengali families. But Aseemanand and his brothers were also drawn to the RSS, whose own version of social service was burgeoning under the leadership of MS Golwalkar. â€œI have gone after ideologies in my youth and lived by them,â€ Aseemanand recalled his father telling them. â€œSo I understand when you are influenced by an ideology and want to follow it. But the RSS is the organisation that killed Gandhi, so it is my duty to warn you against it.â€ The boys nevertheless grew close to local RSS workers, who often ate with the brothers at the Sarkar house, and they began participating in local shakhas. Aseemanandâ€™s elder brother joined the RSS full time. Aseemanand and his younger brother Sushant Sarkar, whom I met in Kamarpukur, told me that their father didnâ€™t try to prevent this, but he issued a stern warning: they were never to introduce him to a member of the Sangh.

The balance of Aseemanandâ€™s beliefs tilted dramatically during his twenties, under the mentorship of two Sangh members. The first was Bijoy Adya, an RSS worker who guided Aseemanand towards radical Hindu politics. In his office in Kolkata, where he now edits the Bengali RSS newsweekly Swastika, Adya told me that he first met Aseemanand in 1971. Aseemanand was studying for his bachelorâ€™s degree in physics at a local universityâ€”he eventually got his masterâ€™s degree as wellâ€”but â€œhis parents always understood that he was different from their other sons,â€ Adya said. â€œThey knew that there was no way he would lead a normal life like the other brothers.â€ Aseemanand was also still a regular at the Ramakrishna Mission. â€œIt was in fact from his house that I read all the major literatureâ€ on Vivekananda, Adya said.

One of the books in the Sarkar library was A Rousing Call to the Hindu Nation, a collection of Vivekanandaâ€™s writing and speeches edited by Eknath Ranade, a stalwart of the Hindutva movement whose colleagues gave him the nickname â€œunderground sarsanghchalakâ€ for his leadership of the RSS during its prohibition following Gandhiâ€™s assassination. The book emphasised Vivekanandaâ€™s call to Hindus to â€œArise! Awake! And stop not until the goal is reached.â€ The Ramakrishna Mission had wrongfully made Vivekananda a secular figure in order to get government funding, and it took Ranadeâ€™s text to correct this, Adya said. (At the behest of the RSS chief Golwalkar, Ranade also oversaw the construction of the Rs. 1.35-crore Vivekananda Rock Memorial off Kanyakumari, which was completed in 1970.) Adya encouraged Aseemanand to read the book.

â€œAccording to Ramakrishna Mission every religion is equal,â€ Aseemanand told me. â€œThey used to celebrate Christmas, Eidâ€”so I used to do the same. When Adya said that this was not what Vivekananda preached I did not believe him.â€ He then took up Ranadeâ€™s text. One particular line from Vivekananda dominated Aseemanandâ€™s reading: â€œEvery man going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more.â€

â€œI got a huge shock after reading this,â€ Aseemanand said. â€œIn the days that followed, I gave this a lot of thought. Then I realised that it is not in my limited capacity to realise or fully analyse Vivekanandaâ€™s teachings, but since he has said it, I will follow it all my life.â€ He never visited the Ramakrishna Mission again.

IF RANADEâ€™S VERSION OF VIVEKANANDA became the soul of Aseemanandâ€™s political conviction, its form was provided by an RSS worker and ascetic named Basant Rao Bhatt, who had moved to Calcutta from Nagpur, in 1956, to work under Ranade. Bhatt was fiercely dedicated to the mission of the RSS, but had a soft, disarming charisma; Aseemanand told me that even his father once remarked, â€œIt is hard to believe that an organisation that has people like Basant working for it could be bad.â€ In Bhatt, who eventually became the chief of RSS operations for West Bengal, Aseemanand found an example of how to unite the ideology of the Sangh with the sort of pastoral service practised by monks of the Ramakrishna Mission.

When Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency and banned the RSS in 1975, she started cracking down on its members. Thousands of Sangh workers were thrown in jail, including Aseemanand. Bhatt followed the example of his mentor, Ranade, and began operating underground, providing for the families of the imprisoned. When the ban was lifted at the end of the Emergency, Bhatt started a new wing of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, to cover Bengal and the Northeast. Soon after, Aseemanand moved in with him and began working full-time for the organisation. In 1978, they founded the first VKA ashram in the north-eastern part of the country, in the forests of Baghmundi, near Purulia, West Bengal.

The push towards the Northeast was part of a nationwide expansion of the VKA into tribal areas. Since it was founded in Jashpur (now in Chhattisgarh) by the RSS leader Balasaheb Deshpandeâ€”who began his work with a dozen children of the Oraon tribeâ€”the organisation has strived to counter the influence of Christian missionaries and to prevent tribals from converting. Christianity, the Sangh believes, is a threat to the integrity of the nation, breeding separatist movements like those that have long operated in the Northeast. The VKAâ€™s methods are largely derived from the successful model of Christian evangelists: it runs playgroups, primary and middle schools, hostels and health services that also serve as centres for proselytisation. Its goal is to promote Hindutva and thereby increase the cultural and political capital of the RSS.

Aseemanand spent most of the next ten years working in Purulia to advance these aims. But he also decided to follow some version of the monastic path his parents intended for him, and at 31 he resolved to take sanyaas. Bhatt told him that if working with tribals and furthering the Sanghâ€™s cause was his mission, he didnâ€™t need to join a holy order. But Aseemanand had made up his mind, and left Purulia for the ashram of the Bengali guru Swami Paramananda. â€œI chose him to be my guru because he followed Ramakrishnaâ€™s teachings,â€ Aseemanand said. â€œHe worked mainly with the Dalits, but he was also involved in the propagation of Hinduism.â€ Paramananda administered the vows of sanyaas to Naba Kumar Sarkar, and renamed him Aseemanandâ€”â€œboundless joy.â€

After taking sanyaas, Aseemanand returned to Purulia and his work with the tribals. His life at the ashram there brought him into contact with the top leaders of VKA, including its all-India organising secretary, K Bhaskara Rao, who was also for much of his life the RSS chief for Kerala (which today boasts over 4,000 shakhasâ€”more than any other state). Impressed by Aseemanand, in 1988 Rao and the VKA president, Jagdev Ram Oraon, asked him to extend the VKAâ€™s dharma jagranâ€”its work of spiritual awakeningâ€”to the Andamans.

Since colonial times, many of the more than 500 islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago have been settled by Indians from the mainland. To build townships for the settlers, tribals from areas in what is now Chhattisgarh were often shipped in. By the 1970s, the Sangh feared that tribal migrants to the Andamans were becoming increasingly enthralled by Christian missionaries, making the islands hostile to Hindus and Hindutva, Aseemanand told me. The islands had been represented in parliament for more than a decade by a Congressman, Manoranjan Bhakta. Aseemanand was to go and establish a foothold for the RSS.

â€œWhen I landed in the Andamans for the first time, there was no place to work from, no people to work with,â€ Aseemanand said. He set about forming bonds with tribal settlers through a combination of folksiness and unvarnished religious zeal. Although he didnâ€™t go into detail, he told me that even in the Andamans he was using the threat of violence to coerce tribals into embracing Hindusim. He called these reformations â€œghar vapasiâ€â€”homecomings. (The Sangh maintains that adivasis are fundamentally Hindus, not animists, and talks about â€œreconversionâ€.)

Aseemanand also employed more sophisticated types of propaganda. He lived among the tribal settlers, seeking out older members of the community who had not fully embraced their new religion. â€œThey told me that though they had converted to Christianity, they still wanted to keep their traditions aliveâ€”the festivals, their dance,â€ he said. â€œSo I told them that it is my job to get this done.â€

Armed with the goodwill of these community elders, Aseemanand recruited half a dozen young girls, then sent them to a Vivekananda centre in Kanyakumari to teach them bhajans and get them to â€œstart believing in Hanuman,â€ he said. Afterwards, he took them to the VKA headquarters at Jashpur, where they learned about Hindu culture for three months. Aseemanand and the girls then began a sort of road show, circulating through Andaman villages to lead bhajans and recruit another set of children. Because Aseemanand felt it was not right to travel in the company of young single women, the girls were married off, and the next batch of childrenâ€”trained by the girlsâ€”were around 8 years old.

Aseemanand then set about formalising the Hindu community by building permanent spaces for worship and creating official bodies to look after them. In Port Blair, a man named R Damodaran became the president of the local temple committee, and a Bengali named Bishnu Pada Ray became the secretary.

Aseemanand lived full-time in the Andamans until the early 1990s. He said his efforts there laid the groundwork for Ray to become the territoryâ€™s first BJP parliamentarian, in 1999. â€œI told him that itâ€™s good for him to go into politics, and so he went to Delhi and met Vajpayeeji,â€ Aseemanand told me. â€œPolitics is also part of our work.â€ Damodaran was unanimously elected the chairman of the Port Blair Municipal Council in 2007.

Even after leaving the Andamans, Aseemanand frequently returned, sometimes to hand out medicines and food following natural disasters. But he callously restricted his relief efforts to those who declared themselves Hindu. He told me one story about the aftermath of the tsunami in 2004. â€œA Christian woman came for milk for her child,â€ he recalled. â€œMy people said no. She said that the kid had not had any food for three days, and pleaded that it would die if we didnâ€™t give some milk. So please give some. Then they said go ask Swamiji. I told her that what they are doing is right. You wonâ€™t get any milk here.â€ It is a story he likes to repeat.

[III]

THE DANGS IS THE SMALLEST, least populated district of Gujarat, and lies in its southern tail, bordered by Maharashtra to the east and west. Seventy-five percent of its population of roughly 2 lakh lives below the poverty line, and 93 percent is adivasi. Like other tribal areas, it has seen a disproportionate share of conflicts over resources and ideology. The British first subdued the areaâ€™s tribal kings in the 1830s, and obtained the rights to exploit the Dangsâ€™ teak-rich forest, which still covers more than half the district, in 1842. Apart from Christian missionaries, the British banned all social workers and political activists from the area, fearing the influence they might exert over adivasisâ€™ sense of entitlement to the land. The first mission school there was founded in Ahwa, the district headquarters, in 1905, and Christian evangelists of many denominations have been active in the area ever since. According to Aseemanand, Christians used to call the Dangs â€œPaschim ka Nagalandâ€â€”the Nagaland of the west. â€œThe threat was as big as in the Northeast,â€ he said.

Aseemanand first visited the Dangs in 1996, while touring the country on behalf of the VKA. The organisationâ€™s leaders had asked him to take his successful conversion programmes into every tribal area in India; they had even created a Shraddha Jagran Vibhag (faith awakening wing) and installed him as its president. But Aseemanand thought he could have a greater impact working in a single area, and felt a strong pull to the Dangs. The Dangs â€œhad the kind of work that I am good atâ€”staying among the tribals and working with them,â€ he said. â€œOne should always do the work from which one gains contentment.â€ Unlike the Northeast, he told me, there was still a chance to reclaim the Dangs from Christians.

First and foremost, however, Aseemanand was loyal to the Sangh, and his superiors were worried that he would be unable to fulfil his national mandate from the forests of Gujarat. Aseemanand didnâ€™t convince them to let him focus his operations on the Dangs until 1998. Their anxiety proved unwarranted: less than a year after setting up in the district, Aseemanand managed to galvanise Sangh cadres across the country with his combination of evangelical outreach and violent coercion. Rao, the VKA organising secretary and Kerala RSS chief, called it â€œan example for the whole nation,â€ Aseemanand recalled.

By the time Aseemanand stationed himself at a VKA ashram in Waghai, in 1998, religious differences were already straining adivasi communities in the Dangs, many tribals told me. Christian proselytisation in the area had been relatively limited before the 1970s; but since 1991 the Christian population in the Dangs had been growing by roughly 9 percent each year, according to census figures. When parents died, brother would fight brother over what sort of funeral rites they should perform. In the year before Aseemanand arrived, 20 attacks on Christians had been reported in the district, and they continued sporadically throughout 1998.

Every year, the VKA ashram housed around two-dozen tribal boys, providing them with free food and accommodation so they could attend a local government school. A day at the ashram began with Aseemanand leading the boys in chanting the Ekata mantra, an ode to Bharat Mata and prominent Indiansâ€”from Gandhi to Golwalkarâ€”sung by RSS swayamsevaks to open every session at the shakhas. One of the students that Aseemanand met at the ashram was Phoolchand Bablo. Aseemanand credited Bablo, who became a sort of guide and aide-de-camp for the swami, with much of the success of his work in the Dangs.

When I visited the Waghai ashram last year, Bablo came from his village to meet me. He was plump, with a round face and a smile whose warmth reflected in his eyesâ€”the sort of person I felt I could trust to give me directions in a strange land. Even the most disturbing stories Bablo told me were imbued with this warmth.

Aseemanandâ€™s methods were similar to those he used in the Andamans. He trusted Bablo to guide him to communities where he would be easily welcomed and could recruit aides to extend his influence throughout the forests. He and his volunteers would then hike to remote tribal villages, where they camped for up to a week at a time, eating with the adivasis and sleeping in their huts. Aseemanand preached Hinduism; distributed chocolates, Hanuman lockets, and copies of the Hanuman chaalisa to children; sang bhajans; and told the villagers that they should not be converting to Christianity. In every village, Aseemanand and his aides would make lists of people who could be baptised into Hinduism. The lists were closely monitored by Aseemanand. When he left for the next settlement, his aides would make sure that the adivasisâ€™ huts were flying the saffron pennant of the Sangh.

Aseemanand married these comparatively soft methods to fear mongering. â€œHe talked of real life situations like that in the districts on the borders of Bengal,â€ Bablo said. â€œOver there, the entire Hindu community had to flee because of the Muslims who keep coming in from the other side.â€ In pamphlets that he printed in the thousands and distributed throughout the district, Aseemanand also denounced Christians. The header on one flier, announcing a massive rally in June 1998, warned: â€œCome Hindus, Beware of Thieves.â€ The invective below read: â€œThe most burning problem of Dang District is the establishments being run by Christian priests â€¦ Wearing a mask of service these Satans are exploiting the adivasis â€¦ Lies and deceit are their religion.â€ Aseemanand soon turned these execrations into violence.

On Christmas evening 1998, the Deep Darshan High School, in Ahwa, was attacked by members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal, and the Hindu Jagran Manch (HJM), an offshoot of the VKA. Sister Lily, one of the Carmelite nuns who ran the school, said more than 100 people armed with stones participated in the rampage, breaking windows and destroying the roof of the schoolâ€™s hostel for tribal boys. â€œEven after all these years I can still visualise it,â€ Sister Lily told me when I visited her at the school. â€œI was so frightened that day.â€

Thirty kilometres away, in Subir, another school was attacked; a grain shed there was looted and then set on fire. In Gadhvi village, a mob of reportedly 200 people demolished the local church and then set it ablaze; afterwards, they went to a neighbouring village and burnt down the church there. The church in Waki village was torched the next day; a forest department jeep was reportedly used in the attack. The day after, six village churches in the Dangs were destroyed. The homes of Christian tribals were pelted with stones. Christian and Muslim businesses were destroyed, and Christian tribals were assaulted.

The destruction carried on like this for a total of ten days. Between mid December 1998 and mid January of the next year, â€œ40,000 Christians got converted to Hinduism,â€ Aseemanand proudly claimed. â€œWe demolished 30 churches and built temples. There was some commotion.â€

The violence had started with three Hindu Jagran Manch rallies on Christmas morningâ€”one in Ahwa and two in tehsils of a neighbouring districtâ€”organised by Aseemanand. According to Dasharath Pawar, who was then a general secretary of a BJP unit in the Dangs, 3,500 Sangh members wielding trishuls and lathis participated in the Ahwa rally. Slogans echoing Aseemanandâ€™s anti-Christian rhetoric were raised. The townâ€™s main road was hung with saffron banners. Local priests had petitioned the district collector, Bharat Joshi, to intervene. Instead of defusing the situation, he graced the dais at the Ahwa rally with his presence.

The scale of the rioting that followed the rallies owed a great deal to Aseemanandâ€™s skill as an organiser. Before he arrived, there were only a handful of Sangh workers in the district; Aseemanand pumped energy into the Hindutva movement and turned it into a force with thousands of members, Pawar said. â€œHis words were powerful enough to awake the sleeping Hindutva in you.â€

â€œTo stop conversions is an easy job,â€ Aseemanand told me. â€œUse the route of religion. Make the Hindus kattar [fanatic]. The rest of the work will be done by them.â€

One of the accomplishments Aseemanand claimed in this respect was the founding of the HJM, which was set up to look like a purely tribal organisation. Because of the violence involved, â€œwe couldnâ€™t do all the Sanghâ€™s work through VKA,â€ he said. â€œSo we had to make HJM for this with tribals. This Janubhaiâ€â€”the ostensible HJM Presidentâ€”â€œdidnâ€™t know a thing. What plan of action to undertake, what to print in the pamphlets, all those decisions were taken by us. We just kept him as a face since he is a tribal. Adivasis used to do all the Sanghâ€™s work.â€

Whether by inspiration or intimidation, Aseemanandâ€™s ghar vapasi programmes also became increasingly popular. For the next three to four years, whenever they had a roster of 50 to 100 potential converts, he and his aides would gather them up and haul them in open trucks and jeeps to the Unai temple in Surat. After a dip in a perennial hot spring next to the temple, and a tilak-pooja, the tribals were declared Hindu. They were packed back into the vehicles with a photo of Hanuman and a copy of the Hanuman chaalisa under their arms. On the way back, bhajans were blared from the vehicles so that the whole programme became a spectacle. The carnivals would stop at the Waghai ashram, where Aseemanand hosted a feast and gave each convert a Hanuman locket.

Aseemanandâ€™s concern for the tribals rarely extended farther than the question of whether they were praying to Jesus Christ or to Ram. In an interview with The Week, in January 1999, Aseemanand said, â€œWe are not interested in poverty alleviation or developmental activities. We are only trying to uplift the tribals spiritually.â€ This approach, backed by Aseemanandâ€™s participation in local communities, had a powerful appeal. â€œI have never seen a person live a more difficult life than Swamiji,â€ Bablo said. â€œWith utmost devotion, he goes and stays with the most backward community. He stays there, eats there, and mingles with themâ€”and makes those people his own. The people end up getting confident that now we, too, have someone to stand up for us.â€

ASEEMANAND DESCRIBED THE DANGS TO ME as one of the most beautiful places in India. Many journalists who worked there in the late 1990s agreed. When I visited the area in June 2013, the forest was grey and bare. (â€œYou should see it during the monsoon,â€ Aseemanand told me in Ambala jail.) What stood out to me were the regionâ€™s roadsâ€”miles and miles of world-class highways carved into the mountains. They were built by the government of Aseemanandâ€™s most important political patron, Narendra Modi.

Around the time Aseemanand moved to the Dangs, in early 1998, the BJP politician Keshubhai Patel was sworn in as Gujaratâ€™s chief minister. For most of the period since Independence, the state had been a Congress stronghold, although Patel had also headed it for seven months in 1995. In March 1998, when Vajpayee became the prime ministerâ€”and the ideological compromises of his government were still in the futureâ€”there was a surge of expectation in the RSS cadre that their vision for India was coming into being.

The Christmas riots in the Dangs seemed in some small measure to herald the change they desired. An early indication of Aseemanandâ€™s success was the appearance of Sonia Gandhi, who travelled to Ahwa to condemn what she called the â€œheart-breakingâ€ violence. Other politicians and celebrities followed suit. The news coverage significantly raised Aseemanandâ€™s public profileâ€”and his esteem within the Sangh. Not long after, the RSS granted him its annual Shri Guruji award, another honour named after Golwalkar.

To quell the uproar in Delhi over Aseemanandâ€™s riots, LK Advani, then the home minister, was forced to intervene. â€œWhen my conversion stories made national news, and when Sonia Gandhi flew down to make speeches against me, there was a lot of discussion in the media,â€ Aseemanand said. â€œThen Advaniji was the home minister and asked Keshubhai Patel to rein me in. So then he started stopping us from working and even arrested my people.â€ But Modi was already waiting in the wings, and sharpening his knives. Aseemanand said that Modi approached him at a senior RSS gathering in Ahmedabad, and told him, â€œI know what Keshubhai is doing to you. Swamiji there is no comparison to what you are doing. You are doing the real work. Now it has been decided that I will be the CM. Let me come and then I will do your work. Rest easy.â€ (Repeated attempts to contact Modi through his office went unanswered.)

Modi became the chief minister in October 2001. When the anti-Muslim riots that killed over 1,200 Gujaratis began at the end of the following February, Aseemanand orchestrated his own attacks north of the Dangs, in the Panchmahal district, he claimed: â€œThe wiping out of Muslims from this area was also overseen by me.â€

Later that year, Modi came to the Dangs to help consolidate Aseemanandâ€™s influence. In October 2002, Aseemanand started construction on Shabari Dham, a sacred precinct dedicated to the tribal woman believed to have helped Ram during his legendary 14-year exile. To raise funds for the precinctâ€™s ashram and temple, whose centrepiece would be a statue of Ram, he organised an eight-day Ramkatha (Ramayana recital) by the celebrated rhapsode Morari Bapu. The performance attracted at least 10,000 people. Modi, in the midst of campaigning to regain his chief ministershipâ€”his government had dissolved that July, in the aftermath of the riotsâ€”appeared on stage to help kick off the performance.

Part of Modiâ€™s election manifesto that year was the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Bill, which proposed that all religious conversions be approved by a district magistrate. Four months after Aseemanandâ€™s fundraiser, Modiâ€™s trusted aide Amit Shah brought the bill before the state assembly; the bill passed, and was signed into law in April 2003. Soon, Aseemanand, with the help of Morari, Modi, and the leadership of the RSS, began planning a high-profile ghar vapasi in the Dangs.

At the end of his Ramkatha, Morari had proposed a new kumbh mela at Shabari Dham. The festival, which took four years to prepare, would be a demonstration against conversion and a celebration of Hindutva. Aseemanand took it upon himself to organise the mela, together with the RSS.

In the second week of February 2006, tens of thousands of Indians flooded into the forest village of Subir, six kilometres from Aseemanandâ€™s ashram at Shabari Dham, to attend the inaugural Shabari Kumbh Mela. Like the four traditional kumbh melas which it was meant to emulate, the Shabari Kumbh centred on an act of ritual purification; by ceremonially plunging themselves into a local river, adivasis would signal their return to the Hindu fold. Thousands of people from tribal districts across central India were trucked to the event; the response to an RTI application I filed stated that the Gujarat government spent at least Rs. 53 lakh to divert water into the riverâ€”making it ample enough to accommodate the crowds.

The Shabari Kumbh was also a show of unity within the Hindu Right: over the three-day mela, well-known religious figures (such as Morari Bapu, Asaram Bapu, Jayendra Saraswati and Sadhvi Rithambhara), top leaders from the RSS and the broader Sangh Parivar (including Indresh Kumar, and the hard-line Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders Pravin Togadia and Ashok Singhal), and senior BJP politicians (including the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan) shared the dais. Hundreds of full-time RSS members and thousands of the organisationâ€™s volunteers managed the event. As one pair of researchers put it, the Shabari Kumbh was a â€œconfluence of â€¦ sadhus, Sangh and sarkarâ€.

On the festivalâ€™s opening day, Modi (who had regained power the previous December) told the audience that every attempt to take tribals away from Ram would fail. Behind the stage was a giant mural of the Hindu deity firing an arrow into a ten-headed Ravana. The then RSS chief, KS Sudarshan, took a more belligerent line. â€œWe are up against a kapat yuddha [deceitful war] by fundamentalist Muslims and Christians,â€ he told a gathering of sadhus, adding that this had to be â€œcombated with everything at our commandâ€. Sudarshanâ€™s deputy, Mohan Bhagwat (who became sarsanghchalak when Sudarshan retired, in March 2009), told the group, â€œThose opposing us will have their teeth broken.â€

ACCORDING TO NEWS REPORTS, anywhere from 150,000 to 500,000 people attended the kumbh, although few reconversions were witnessed. Today, there are barely any devotees flocking to the Shabari Dham temple, and the temple cannot afford support staff. The ashram where Aseemanand lived has been demolished. Pradeep Patel, who assists the templeâ€™s chief pujari, told me that the temple has become notorious because of its association with Aseemanand, and this has kept away all the generous Gujarati contributors the temple used to attract. The few Maharashtrians who visit the place barely drop a Rs. 10 note in the bhandaar, having spent all their money on travelling to the Dangs. A disappointed Aseemanand told me, â€œIt is my mistake. I couldnâ€™t build it properly.â€

There is nevertheless a flurry of activity in the area. The Gujarat government seems to think that temples are what the region needs the most, so that the Dangs can earn its bread and butter through religious tourism. In 2012, the state inaugurated the Rama Trail project, a government initiative to commemorate the journey undertaken by the mythological characters of the Ramayana, and Shabari Dham features prominently in the plan.

The response to an RTI petition I filed revealed that under the Rama Trail project, the Shabari temple received Rs. 13 crore from the state government to build a Shiv temple, four fountains, a service road and compound wall, a huge parking lot, and a seating plazaâ€”and to cover the costs of sanitation, flooring, electrification and water supply. In contrast, Modiâ€™s government is yet to submit plans that would allow it to deploy an Rs. 11.6-crore grant handed out by the central government, under the Backward Regions Grant Fund scheme, to foster development in the Dangs. The money has been lying unclaimed for the last six years. Local Christian institutions have also been shut out by the state. â€œFrom 1998 we have been blacklisted in Gandhinagar,â€ Sister Lily, at Deep Darshan High School, said. â€œWe have been putting up files for new grants for the school every year, but they donâ€™t give us anything.â€

The Unai temple in Navsari, where Aseemanand carried out his mass conversions, also received Rs. 3.63 crore under the Rama Trail project. Work on the main building was completed by the time I visited, in June 2013. The new structure was magnificent, imposing. Behind its walls, it hid the humble old temple where Aseemanand brought his tribal bands for reconversion. A priest at the temple told me grimly that the number of visitors to the temple has spiked in recent years, but the hot springs have dried up for the first time.

[IV]

FOR THE THREE YEARS PRECEDING the Shabari Kumbh, alongside preparing for the festival, Aseemanand had been meeting with several other long-time Sangh workers to discuss a problem far more distressing to them than religious conversions. At the core of this group were Pragya Singh Thakur, the executive member of the ABVP; and Sunil Joshi, the former RSS district leader in Indore.

In early 2003, Aseemanand received a phone call from Jayantibhai Kewat, who was then a BJP general secretary for the Dangs. â€œPragya Singh wants to meet you,â€ Kewat told him. Kewat arranged for them to visit his house in Navsari, Surat, the next month.

Aseemanand remembered bumping into Singh at the house of a VHP worker in Bhopal, in the late 1990s. He was struck by her appearanceâ€”short hair, T-shirt, jeansâ€”and her fiery rhetoric. (In a characteristic tirade delivered sometime after 2006, Singh declared, â€œwe will put an end to [terrorists and Congress leaders] and reduce them to ashes.â€) In Navsari, Singh told Aseemanand that in a monthâ€™s time she would visit him at the VKAâ€™s Waghai ashram.

It was Aseemanandâ€™s ardent championing of Hindutva, his â€œHindu ka kaamâ€, Singh told me, that first drew her to him. â€œHe was a great sanyaasi, doing great work for the country,â€ she said, when we met last December in Bhopal.

After the Navsari meeting, Singh soon arrived in the Dangs as promised. Three men accompanied her. One was Sunil Joshi.

People who knew Joshi described him as â€œeccentric and hyperactiveâ€, according to news reports. Singh told me he was like a brother, and that they met through the RSS. Aseemanand recalled that, in later years, when he sheltered Joshi at the Shabari Dham ashram, Joshi would spend all day incanting bhajans and performing poojas while Aseemanand roamed the forest, visiting tribals. Around the time Joshi and Singh first started spending time with Aseemanand, Joshi was wanted for the murder of a Congress tribal leader and the Congressmanâ€™s son in Madhya Pradesh, a crime for which the RSS reportedly excommunicated him.

Another member soon joined their group. While working in Canada, an administrative professional named Bharat Rateshwar had also heard about Aseemanandâ€™s work in the Dangs; he decided to give up his life abroad and return to India to help. Rateshwar built a house, in nearby Valsad district, where Aseemanandâ€™s collaborators would stay on their way to his ashram.

Aseemanand and Pragya Singh both told me that they met frequently in the years leading up to the kumbh. Above all, they discussed the growth of the countryâ€™s Muslim population, which Aseemanand considered the biggest threat to the nation. â€œWith Christians, we can always stand together and threaten them,â€ Aseemanand told me. â€œBut Muslims were multiplying fast.â€ He continued, â€œHave you seen the videotapes in which the Taliban slaughter people? Yes, I did talk in meetings about that. I said that if Muslims multiply like this they will make India a Pakistan soon, and Hindus here will have to undergo the same torture.â€ The group explored â€œways to curb thisâ€, he said. They were also angered by Islamic terrorist attacks, especially on Hindu places of worship such as Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, where 30 people were killed, in 2002. Aseemanandâ€™s solution to this problem, which he advocated frequently, was to retaliate against innocent Muslims. His refrain was bomb ka badla bombâ€”a bomb for a bomb.

The groupâ€™s conversations continued over the next two years, as Aseemanand prepared the kumbh. Soon, Mohan Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar gave their sanction to the plot, according to the account Aseemanand gave me. While they took centre stage at the kumbh along with other leaders of the Hindu Right, Aseemanand retreated to his ashram. Despite his seniority and popularity within the Sangh, he had agreed with Bhagwat and Kumar that he should publicly distance himself from the RSS. â€œIt was a strategy that we took at the time,â€ Aseemanand told me. Instead of participating in the kumbh, he was to focus in secret on planning the attacks.

LESS THAN A MONTH AFTER THE SHABARI KUMBH, two bombs exploded in Varanasi, killing 28 people and injuring a hundred more. One of the explosives was placed at the entrance to a Hindu temple. Aseemanand, Singh, Joshi, and Rateshwar immediately convened at Shabari Dham, where they decided to conjure up a reply.

In his confession, Aseemanand said that Joshi and Rateshwar agreed to head to Jharkand to purchase pistols, and SIM cards to be used in detonators. Aseemanand gave them Rs. 25,000. He also suggested that they try to recruit other radical sadhus to the conspiracy. (In the end, the Ram bhakts he nominated chose to stick to vitriol.) In Jharkand, Joshi contacted his friend Devender Gupta, the RSS chief of Jamathada district, who helped them secure fake driving licences with which to purchase SIM cards.

In June 2006, the team rallied at Rateshwarâ€™s house. Joshi and Singh arrived with four new members of the conspiracyâ€”Sandeep Dange, Ramchandra Kalsangra, Lokesh Sharma, and a man known only as Amit. Dange, whose nickname was â€œTeacherâ€, was the RSS district head in Madhya Pradeshâ€™s Shajapur district; Kalsangra was an RSS organiser from Indore.

According to chargesheets, Joshi formed three task forces to carry out the blasts. One group would motivate and shelter young men whom they would recruit to plant the bombs; one would procure materials for the bombs; and the third would assemble the devices and execute the attacks. Joshi agreed to be the only connecting thread between the various parts of the conspiracy. He then suggested that they target the Samjhauta Express in order to kill the maximum number of Pakistanis. Aseemanand proposed Malegaon, Hyderabad, Ajmer and Aligarh Muslim University.

Several months went by in the Dangs without news. Then, during Diwali celebrations, Joshi came to meet Aseemanand at Shabari Dham. According to Aseemanandâ€™s confession statement, Joshi claimed responsibility for two explosions in Malegaon, on 8 September, that killed 31 people. Dange, along with Kalsangra, had helped Joshi procure bomb-making materials, assemble the explosives, and execute the attacks, according to chargesheets.

On 16 February 2007â€”a Shivratri dayâ€”Joshi and Aseemanand met again, at the Kardmeshwar Mahadev Mandir in Balpur, Gujarat. â€œThere is going to be some good newsâ€ in the next few days, Joshi told Aseemanand, according to the confession. Two days later, the Samjhauta Express was bombed. A day or so after that, Joshi, Aseemanand and some members of the larger conspiracy met at Rateshwarâ€™s house, where Joshi took credit for the attack. This time he told Aseemanand that Dange and his aides carried out the blast. Attacks continued over the next eight months; in May, the group bombed Hyderabadâ€™s Mecca Masjid and, in October, they bombed the Ajmer dargah.

On 19 February 2007, Singh had sat down to watch breaking news of the Samjhauta blast with her sister and her aide Neera Singh, according to a witness statement given by Neera. When images of the destruction brought Neera to tears, Singh asked her not to cry, because all the dead were Muslims. When Neera pointed out that there were some Hindus among the dead, Singh replied, â€œChanay ke saath gur bhi pista haiâ€ (A little jaggery must be ground with the gram). Then Singh treated her sister and Neera to ice cream.

AT THE END OF 2007, things in the conspiracy took a turn for the worse. On 29 December, Sunil Joshi was shot dead on an isolated stretch of road near his motherâ€™s house, in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. Joshi had four aidesâ€”Raj, Mehul, Ghanshyam and Ustadâ€”who lived with him and were almost always in his company. (Raj and Mehul are wanted by police for the Best Bakery arson attack, in which 14 people were burned alive during the Gujarat riots in 2002.) All four mysteriously disappeared after Joshiâ€™s killing.

When he learned of Joshiâ€™s death, Aseemanand, looking for information about the killing, dialled the telephone number of a Military Intelligence officer he had met at a meeting of the militant RSS offshoot Abhinav Bharat, in Nasikâ€”Lt Col Shrikant Purohit.

Purohit is a mysterious figure. For the last three years, he has been behind bars for planning the second Malegaon blast, of 2008. Time and again, he has claimed that he was acting as a double agent under orders from his army superiors. â€œI have done my job properly, have kept my bosses in the loopâ€”and everything is on paper in the army records,â€ he told Outlook, in 2012. â€œThose who need to know know the truth.â€ Pragya Singhâ€™s lawyer, Ganesh Sovani, told me they are treading carefully with Purohit: â€œWe donâ€™t know what his real intentions are.â€ According to Aseemanandâ€™s confession statements, Purohit told him that since Joshi was involved in the murder of the tribal Congressman, this must have been an act of revenge.

Five months later, three bombs exploded in Maharashtra and Gujaratâ€”two in Malegaon, and one in Modasaâ€”killing at least seven people and injuring roughly 80. Aseemanand soon received a call from Sandeep Dange, who asked Aseemanand to shelter him at Shabari Dham for a few days. Aseemanand was on his way to Nadiad in Gujarat and didnâ€™t think it wise to leave Dange in the ashram in his absence. Dange asked Aseemanand to pick him up from a bus depot in Vyara, 70 kilometres from Shabari Dham, and drop him in Baroda. In Vyara, Aseemanand met a very worried Dange, along with Ramchandra Kalsangra. They said they were coming from Maharashtra. Aseemanand later recalled to police that throughout the three-hour journey to Baroda they remained completely silent.

Singh was the first of the main conspirators to be captured, in October 2008, in connection with the second Malegaon bombing, after the Mumbai ATS determined that a scooter used in the blast belonged to her. Allegations soon emerged that she had been brutally tortured while in police custody. The news deeply disturbed Aseemanand. In the first week of November, the Mumbai ATS made another major arrest in the caseâ€”Purohit. He is alleged to have trained the terror suspects in bomb assembly, and supplied RDX from army stocks. Later that month, the ATS arrested a conspirator named Dayanand Pandey. Then the arrests suddenly came to a halt; Hemant Karkare, the celebrated chief of the Mumbai ATS, who was heading the investigation, was shot dead on 26 November during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Little changed until April 2010, when the Rajasthan ATS, while investigating the Ajmer bombing, arrested Devendra Gupta, the RSS district head from Jharkhand who had provided fake identification to Joshi and Rateshwar, and two others. The NIA took over the Samjhauta case that July. Meanwhile, the CBI was investigating the Mecca Masjid case, and conducting surveillance on several members of the conspiracy, including Aseemanand.

By now, Aseemanand knew that things were closing in; Phoolchand Bablo told me that in the months before his arrest Aseemanand was very disturbed. â€œHe would be silent, resolutely silent about the news and investigation, and we did not ask him anything,â€ Bablo said. Aseemanand, who was almost 60 at the time, soon left Shabari Dham and began moving around the country in order to evade arrest. The constant travel weakened him, and his health deteriorated. Eventually, he settled in a village outside Haridwar, where he lived under an assumed name until the CBI tracked him down that November. â€œThey had arrested everyone connected to Sunil,â€ Aseemanand told me. â€œI was the last one to be nailed.â€

Aseemanand was thrown in a Hyderabad jail and soon confessed. â€œThe CBI already knew the whole story,â€ Aseemanand told me. One statement Aseemanand made included a surprising account of why he decided to confess. A few days after his detention, he met a Muslim boy named Kaleem, who was also imprisoned in Hyderabad. Kaleem was accused of the Mecca Masjid blasts which Aseemanand had plotted. Kaleem used to wait on Aseemanand, and his kindness aggravated Aseemanandâ€™s conscience. He was confessing, Aseemanand claimed, out of remorse.

When I mentioned this incident in our first interview, Aseemanand gave me a mischievous look. â€œSo how big was the news about Kaleem?â€ he asked. He said the story was completely fabricated by the police. â€œKaleem knew that I was in the same jail, but I couldnâ€™t meet him,â€ Aseemanand said. â€œHow will I ever say such things to a Muslim boy?â€

After his confession, Aseemanand drafted two lettersâ€”one to the President of India claiming responsibility for the Samjhauta blasts, and one to the president of Pakistan, which read: â€œBefore the criminal legal system hangs me, I want an opportunity to transform/reform Hafiz Saeed, Mullah Omar and other jihadi terrorist leaders and jihadi terrorist in Pakistan. Either you can send them to me, or you can ask the Indian government to send me to you.â€

[V]

SUPERINTENDENT OF POLICE Vishal Gargâ€™s office is a modest cubicle in the NIAâ€™s swanky Delhi headquarters. Against one glass wall of the office is a filing cabinet with four drawers labelled â€œAjmer Blastâ€, â€œSamjhauta Blastâ€, â€œSunil Joshi Murderâ€, and â€œStationeryâ€. A white board behind Gargâ€™s desk tracks future court dates for the Samjhauta and Ajmer cases, in which Garg is the investigating officer. On another wall is a â€œwantedâ€ poster featuring Sandeep Dange, Ramchandra Kalsangra and a man named Ashok who are still absconding in the Samjhauta case. The reward for information leading to the arrests of Dange and Kalsangra is one million rupees each.

â€œWe often refer to the Aarushi case here,â€ Garg said when I visited his office last year. â€œThree days after the crime happened, CBI was given the case and they reached the crime scene. You can imagine what valuable evidences must have been lost.â€ Garg looked every bit the part of a counterterrorist IPS officerâ€”down to the aviator sunglasses. â€œWe took over the Samjhauta case three years after the crime,â€ he continued. â€œYou can imagine how difficult the investigation must have been for us.â€

Garg continued, â€œWe have not been able to nail the money trail so far, as these are not bank transactions or ones that are documented. You can call it the limitation of the investigation. We know that Aseemanand has handed over cash to Sunil Joshi, but no idea of how much it was.â€ The source of the explosives used in the blasts is also still under investigation. Pointing to the â€œwantedâ€ poster, Garg said, â€œThese Rs. 10-lakh-award guys are the main brain and main executives of the crime. We need to catch them to get a better picture.â€

The NIA is facing a number of obstacles. In July 2012, the Supreme Court restrained the agency from interrogating Pragya Singh in the murder of Sunil Joshi, on the technical grounds that the caseâ€™s FIR was lodged before the inception of the agency, in 2009. The court has also blocked the agency from questioning Lt Col Srikant Purohit and another accused. The NIA prosecutor and legal advisor Ahmed Khan has advised the agency to club all the cases together and try them in a single court, but no further steps have been taken in this direction.

The NIA says supplementary charge sheets naming more conspirators will be filed soon, and Garg told me he was working hard. â€œLast week one of my subordinates met me at the lift and said, â€˜Saab, aaj aap bade smart lag rahe ho.â€™ I told him he could also look sharp if he gave up sleeping.â€ He broke into a laugh, then told me that he once had a commanding officer who used tell to him that if he slept, he should dream of the good time his suspects must be having.

When I asked Garg why the NIA never questioned Indresh Kumar, he said that it was an internal matter and would not discuss it.

AFTER PRAGYA SINGH WAS ARRESTED, in 2008, Congress leaders such as P Chidambaram and Digvijaya Singh began decrying what they called â€œsaffron terrorâ€. RSS and BJP officials rushed to defend their organisations from the taintâ€”first denouncing and then defending the accused.

â€œI am shocked and it is shameful that the BJP is disowning her and all their organisations are disowning her,â€ the senior BJP leader Uma Bharti said following Pragya Singhâ€™s arrest. â€œWhen they wanted, they used her.â€ The BJP spokesperson Ravishankar Prasad countered, â€œThere is no question of owning or disowning her. She left ABVP in 1995â€“96.â€ The party was later embarrassed when recent photographs surfaced showing Pragya Singh in the company of the BJP president, Rajnath Singh, and Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Another showed her sharing a dais in Gujarat with Narendra Modi during his post-riots election campaign.

When allegations emerged that Pragya Singh was tortured, the BJP changed tack. LK Advani condemned the â€œbarbaric treatmentâ€ meted out to her, and said that it was clear the investigating agency â€œwas acting in a politically motivated and unprofessional mannerâ€. (The political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta later commented, â€œNothing diminished L.K. Advani before the last election more than his artless, passionate and entirely a priori defence of Sadhvi Pragya.â€)

But the RSS launched its most vehement public protest (and one of the largest in its history) a week and a half before Aseemanand was arrested, in November 2010â€”on behalf of Indresh Kumar, whose name had begun cropping up in media reports about the investigations. The Sanghâ€™s chiefs marshalled a nationwide protest. According to Organiser, more than a million people participated in over 700 dharnas across the country; virtually the entire leadership of the RSS and the VHP appeared on stage at the rallies. At a demonstration in Lucknow, Mohan Bhagwat stressed the importance of his own participation in Kumarâ€™s defence. â€œFor the first time in the history of the organisation, a sarsanghchalak has not only attended a dharna but also addressed the meetings as a conspiracy was being hatched to tag terrorism with the RSS,â€ he said. The dais was adorned with a poster featuring the face of Mohandas Gandhi. Bhagwat continued, â€œHindu Samaj, saffron colour and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sanghâ€”all these terms are opposite in meaning to the term terror.â€

The CBI and ATS investigations produced valuable leads and witness statements that clearly point to Kumarâ€™s role in the bomb blasts. The NIAâ€™s own chargesheets indicate that he was the mentor to several of the leading figures in the conspiracy (especially Sunil Joshi), and the CBI has interrogated him. In late July 2011, it was widely reported that the NIA, too, intended to question Kumar. But he was already taunting the agency in the press: â€œWhen NIA has strong evidences against me in terroristsâ€™ act, why isnâ€™t it arresting me?â€ He went on to claim that he, along with Pragya Singh and Aseemanand, had been falsely implicated. The agency is yet to question him.

The RSS and the BJP have taken every opportunity to call the on-going investigations a witch-hunt instigated by the Congress-led government. If this is true, the half-hearted way in which the cases are being handled make one wonder what influence the government really has over the agencies.

When I interviewed Kumar last year, he complained that journalists only ask questions about the RSSâ€™s politics, and arenâ€™t interested in the organistationâ€™s social initiatives. â€œThen they just print those questions and murder the story about our work,â€ he said. â€œNow the media is slowly realising that they have been wrong in ignoring such a diversified organisation as the Sangh.â€ When the conversation turned toward his role in the blast, he said, â€œI warn people to be careful when they write about me.â€ His tone was aggressive. Later, when I telephoned him to ask about the meeting in which he and Bhagwat allegedly gave their blessing to the terrorist attacks, he went completely silent. Mohan Bhagwatâ€™s office asked me to email them for comment, but at the time this article went to press they had not responded.

ON FRIDAY, 24 JANUARY, a special NIA court in Panchkula, Haryana, framed charges against Aseemanand in the Samjhauta blast case. After three years in Ambala jail and 31 months of legal hearings, his trial can finally move forward. In an NIA court in Jaipur, he has been under trial for the Ajmer case since September 2013. His trial in the Mecca Masjid case is not yet underway; last November, he made his first visit in two years to the Hyderabad court that is hearing the case.

Pragya Singh, who is accused number one in the 2008 Malegaon blast, has approached the Bombay High Court to challenge the NIAâ€™s constitutionality. She also claims to be suffering from cancer, and is currently under treatment at an ayurvedic hospital in Bhopal. She has filed various bail applications that are being contested by the NIA.

At this point, it seems the trials may drag on for several more years. Lawyers from both sides blame each other for delaying court proceedings. Over the year and a half that I travelled back and forth from the Panchkula court, there were few newsworthy developments until the framing of the charges.

In Ambala, Aseemanand is now being held in a special B-class cell with Ram Kumar Chaudhary, the Congress parliamentarian from Himachal Pradesh who is accused of murdering a 24-year-old woman in Haryana in November 2012. They share a cook, who prepares them meals on request, and they are only on lockdown during the night.

In our last interview, in January 2014, he asked if I would like some tea. Before I could answer, a lean teenage boy, incarcerated for petty crimes, thrust a plastic cup filled with sweet chai into my hands. Aseemanand pulled him close and said, â€œThis is my boy. He will be released soon.â€ He looked into the teenagerâ€™s face and added, laughing, â€œThis chaiwala might grow up to become Narendra Modi.â€

During our interviews, prison officers often stopped by to ask Aseemanand how he was doing. â€œThey all tell me â€˜jo hua accha hua,â€™â€ Aseemanand saidâ€”whatever happened is good. â€œThey donâ€™t know whether I have done it or not, but they believe that whoever did it, did the right thing.â€

When I visited Kamarpukur, Aseemanandâ€™s village in West Bengal, his family members were largely reluctant to speak with me. But as I left, his younger brother Sushant said to me, â€œWait for a few months. Once Modiji comes to power I will put a stage in the village centre and shout from the loudspeakers all that Aseemanand has done.â€

In one of our meetings, Aseemanand paraphrased the last words of Nathuram Godse: may my bones not be discharged into the sea until the Sindhu river flows through India again. He has assured Phoolchand Bablo that although his trial might take time, he will definitely be released. And he told me that the work of people like him, Pragya Singh and Sunil Joshi will continue: â€œIt will happen. It will happen on time.â€

Correction: The print version of this article mistakenly states that the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003 was withdrawn in 2008. An amendment to the law, passed by the state assembly in 2006, was withdrawn. This has been corrected online. The Caravan regrets the error.

Swami Aseemanand, incarcerated in Ambala Central Jail for abetting terrorist attacks on various targets between 2006 and 2008â€”Samjhauta Express (February 2007), Hyderabad Mecca Masjid (May 2007), Ajmer Dargah (October 2007) and two attacks in Malegaon (September 2006 and September 2008)â€”which together took the lives of 119 people, has made a revelation to The Caravan which has been published in the latest issue of the magazine. In the course of over two years, Aseemanand granted four exclusive interviews to The Caravan journalist Leena Gita Reghunath inside Ambala jail, the total duration of which ran into 09 hours and 26 minutes. In the last two interviews, Aseemanand repeated that his terrorist acts were sanctioned by the highest levels of the RSSâ€”all the way up to Mohan Bhagwat, the current RSS chief, who was the organisationâ€™s general secretary at the time.

Aseemanand told The Caravan that Bhagwat said of the violence, â€œIt is very important that it be done. But you should not link it to the Sangh.â€ (A list of questions was sent to Bhagwat, but he has not responded.)

Extract from the 11,200-word-long The Caravan article:

Over the course of our conversations, Aseemanandâ€™s description of the plot in which he was involved became increasingly detailed. In our third and fourth interviews, he told me that his terrorist acts were sanctioned by the highest levels of the RSSâ€”all the way up to Mohan Bhagwat, the current RSS chief, who was the organisationâ€™s general secretary at the time. Aseemanand told me that Bhagwat said of the violence, â€œItâ€™s very important that it be done. But you should not link it to the Sangh.â€

Aseemanand told me about a meeting that allegedly took place, in July 2005. After an RSS conclave in Surat, senior Sangh leaders including Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar, who is now on the organisationâ€™s powerful seven-member national executive council, travelled to a temple in the Dangs, Gujarat, where Aseemanand was livingâ€”a two-hour drive. In a tent pitched by a river several kilometres away from the temple, Bhagwat and Kumar met with Aseemanand and his accomplice Sunil Joshi. Joshi informed Bhagwat of a plan to bomb several Muslim targets around India. According to Aseemanand, both RSS leaders approved, and Bhagwat told him, â€œYou can work on this with Sunil. We will not be involved, but if you are doing this, you can consider us to be with you.â€

Aseemanand continued, â€œThen they told me, â€˜Swamiji, if you do this we will be at ease with it. Nothing wrong will happen then. Criminalisation nahin hoga (It will not be criminalised). If you do it, then people wonâ€™t say that we did a crime for the sake of committing a crime. It will be connected to the ideology. This is very important for Hindus. Please do this. You have our blessings.â€™â€

Chargesheets filed by the investigative agencies allege that Kumar provided moral and material support to the conspirators, but they donâ€™t implicate anyone as senior as Bhagwat. Although Kumar was interrogated once by the CBI, the case was later taken over by the NIA, which has not pursued the conspiracy past the level of Aseemanand and Pragya Singh. (Joshi, who was allegedly the connecting thread between several different parts of the conspiracyâ€”including those who assembled and those who planted the bombsâ€”was killed under mysterious circumstances in December 2007.)​

Sixty-three-year-old Aseemanand dedicated almost his entire adult life to the tribal arm of the RSS, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA). At the time he planned the terrorist attacks, he had been the national head of the VKAâ€™s religious wing, the Shraddha Jagran Vibhagâ€”a position created especially for himâ€”for a decade. In honour of Aseemanandâ€™s service to the Sangh, in December 2005, he was awarded a special Guruji Samman on the occasion of the birth centenary of MS Golwalkar. The award came with a one-lakh-rupee cash prize and the veteran BJP leader and former party president Murli Manohar Joshi gave the ceremonyâ€™s keynote address. Not only have the RSS and the BJP never disowned Aseemanand for his roles in the terrorist attacks, or taken back the awards, Aseemanand confessed to The Caravan that RSS-affiliated lawyers are providing his legal aid.

Knowing the national relevance of the sensitive information that Aseemanand revealed to The Caravan journalist, in an interview which was conducted with the full consent of Aseemanand, we place these facts in front of the public, along with a tape recording and transcript of parts of the conversation that mention Mohan Bhagwat.

Aseemanand: Mohan Bhagwat, Indresh and Sunil, they all came to meet me in Shabari Dham.

Sunil said to Bhagwatji: Thoda hindu ka akraman hona hai. Sangh se jude hue log hai jo yeh vichar rakhte hai. Jo bhi hoga hum tak hi rakhenge. Sangh se inko jho denge bhi nahin. Aap se koi madat nahi lenge. Aap adhikari hai is liye aap ko bata rahe hai. Is liye aap ko bata raha hai, ki hum log soch rahe hai. [We should do some violence in the name of Hindus. There are many in the Sangh who feel so. Whatever happens it will be limited to us. We will not link the Sangh with this. We won't take any help from you for this. We are letting you know because you are the top officials of the Sangh that we are planning to do this.]

Then Mohanji and Indresh, both said: Yeh bahut achcha hai. Zaroori hai. Sangh se nahi jodna. Sangh nahi karenge. [unclear] Hindutva ke liye bhi aisa koi hai. Sangh ka yeh vichar nahi hai. [This is great. It's very important that it be done. But the Sangh will not do this ... (unclear) ... That now Hindus will also have someone to do this. But donâ€™t link this to the Sangh. Because this not the ideology of the Sangh.]

Then told me: Swamiji aap yeh karenge toh hum nishchint hoga. Koyi galat nahi hoga. Criminalization nahi hoga. Aap karenge toh crime karne keliye kar rahe hai aisa nahin lagega. Ideology ke saath juda rahega. [unclear] Bahut zaruri hai yeh hindu ke liye. Aap log karo. Aashirwad hai. Is se aage kuch bhi nahi. [If you will do this, we will be at ease with this. Nothing wrong will happen then. This will not be criminalized then. If you do it then people won't say that we did a crime for the sake of doing a crime. It will be connected to the ideology. This is very important for Hindus. Please do this. You have our blessings. Nothing more than that from us.]

Aseemanand: Phir kya hua ki Mohanji bola ke [So then Mohanji told me that] â€œaap kaam kar sakte hai.â€ Indreshji bola ki â€œhaan aap kaam kar sakte hai. Sunil ko leke aap kaam kar sakte hai. Par ham log nahi rahenge. Aap hai to ham log aapke saath hai yeh aap maan lena. Aap jo karenge galat nahi hoga. Disha teekh rahega.â€ [You can work on this. You can work on this with Sunil. We will not be involved. But if you are doing this, you can consider us to be with you on this. If you do this we are ensured that nothing wrong will happen. This will be on the right course (with your presence).]

2:29:15
This I had told Bharat and Bharat had told this to the CBI. I was surprised how CBI got to know all these things. That only me, Sunil, Bhagwatji and Indresh had met in a camp at the Shabri Dham. Yeh yeh baat hua tha [we had talked about these particular topics] â€“ it was very surprising to me that how CBI knew about this. [In] 2005, after the Surat meeting this happened, close to Diwali.

â€œThe RSS and the BJP were behind the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid and Malegaon blasts,â€ declared Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde on January 20, 2013, adding that the training camps run by the RSS and BJP were promoting â€˜Hindu terrorismâ€™. A day after Shindeâ€™s declaration, Hafiz Saeed, leader of the LeT, the Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist outfit, called for a ban on the RSS. So Shinde is the witness for the LeT to accuse the RSS of terror. Now look at the evidence, first the blast onboard the Samjhauta Express from Pakistan in which 68 persons were killed.

LeT Culprit, say UN, US

â€œQasmani Arif...chief coordinator of the relations of the [LeT] with other organisations...has worked with Lashkar-e-Tayyiba to facilitate terrorist attacks including...the bombing of February 2007 in the Samjhauta Express in Panipat (India).â€ This is what resolution [No 1267] of the Committee on Sanctions of the United Nations Security Council [UNSC] dated 29.6.2009 declares. Adding that Qasmani was funded by Dawood Ibrahim and he did the fundraising for the LeT and the al-Qaida, the UNSC said, â€œIn exchange for their support, al-Qaida provided support staff for the February 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express in Panipat.â€ This resolution is available on the UN site. Two days later, on July 1, 2009, the United States Treasury Department said in its press release: â€œArif Qasmani has worked with the LeT to facilitate terrorist attacks, including...Samjota Express bombing.â€ The US named four Pakistanis, including Arif Qasmani as terrorists, under Executive Order No 13224. This press release is still on the US Treasury site. The United Nations Security Council and the US Treasury Department thus named the LeT, Qasmani and Dawood Ibrahim as accused in Samjhauta terror. This is just the beginning of the torrent of evidence pointing to the LeT and Pakistan.

Pakistan Ministerâ€™s Confession

Six months after the UN and US announced sanctions against the LeT and Qasmani, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Mallik himself admitted that Pakistani terrorists were involved in the Samjhauta blast, but with a rider that â€œsome Pakistan-based Islamists had been hired by Lt Col Purohit to carry out the Samjhauta Express attack.â€ [India Today Online 24.1.2010]

Headley Involved in Samjhauta -- US Probe

Not just the UN. Or the US Treasury. Or just the admission of Pakistanâ€™s Interior Minister. Independent investigation in the US revealed more. Some 10 months later, Sebastian Rotella, a US journalist, wrote in his investigative report titled â€˜U.S. agencies were forewarned about suspect in 2008 Mumbai bombingsâ€™, that Faiza Outalha, the third wife of David Coleman Headley had confessed [in 2008, which was made public in 2010] that Headley was involved in the Samjhauta blast. Rotella added that Faiza felt that â€œshe had been innocently usedâ€ in the Samjhauta terror. [The Washington Post 5.11.2010] A while later, in a follow up investigation, Sebastian Rotella disclosed in April 2008 that Faiza returned to the embassy in Islamabad with the tip about the 2008 Mumbai blast when she again linked him to the Samjhauta blast.

Rotella commented that though India and the US blamed the attack on Lashkar, the US authorities had not implicated Headley in that still-unsolved attack, however.[The Washington Post 14.11.2010] So, independent, neutral probe in the US also pointed to Pakistan and the LeT in Samjhauta blast.

Narco Test Pointed to SIMI Role

Even at the start of the Samjhauta investigation in 2007, the evidence clearly pointed to the role of the Students Islamic Movement of India [SIMI] and the LeT. India Today [19.9.2008] in its report titled â€˜Pak hand in Mumbai train blasts, Samjhauta Express blasts, says Nagoriâ€™ gave meticulous account of the involvement of the LeT and Pakistan in the Samjhauta terror. The report was based on narco test testimonies of SIMI leaders. India Today said that the narcotic tests were carried out on general secretary of SIMI, Safdar Nagori; his brother Kamruddin Nagori and Amil Parvez in Bangalore in April 2007, three months after the Samjhauta blast; the results of the narco test of the SIMI leaders were available with the magazine; it revealed that SIMI activists had executed the Samjhauta blast, with the help of the Pakistani nationals from across the border; while Nagori was not directly involved, two members of SIMI, Ehtesham Siddiqui and Nasir, were directly involved; SIMI members, including Nagoriâ€™s brother Kamaruddin, were involved in the Samjhatua blast; for executing the Samjhauta blast, the Pakistanis had purchased the suitcase cover from Kataria Market in Indore and one of the members from SIMI had helped the Pakistanis to get the suitcase cover stitched. Investigation had established that in the Samjhauta blast, five bombs packed in suitcases and activated by timer switches were used.

Conspiracy by Maharashtra Police?

Why were these clinching pieces of evidence not pursued? How the blame shifted from the Islamists to the Hindus? Some elements in the Maharashtra Police appears to have colluded in linking the 2008 Malegaon blast to the Samjhauta blast. When leads were thus pointing to Pakistan and SIMI as partners in the Samjhauta blast, in November 2008, as an anti-climax, the Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad [ATS] shockingly told the Special Court through the public prosecutor that Col Purohit allegedly involved in the Malegaon blast in which RDX was used, had supplied RDX for the Samjhauta blast though one â€˜Bhagwanâ€™. [The Indian Express 15.11.2008] Within the next 48 hours, [17.11.2008] India Today online refuted the ATS claim saying that Samjhauta investigators had told India Today that a study of the blast by the National Security Guard(NSG) said that no RDX, but Potassium Chlorate and Sulphur, had been used as explosives. The magazine also recalled that immediately after the blasts, then Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil told the media that not RDX, but, a â€˜new type of explosiveâ€™ had been used to bomb the Samjhauta Express. On that very day [17.11.2008] the ATS counsel retracted the statement he had made earlier involving Col Purohit in the Samjhauta blast. [The Hindu dt19.11.2008]. But the damage was done in the 48 hours. Immediately, Pakistan said that it would raise the issue of Purohitâ€™s involvement in Samjhauta at the Secretary-level meeting on November 25, 2008. Finally on January 20, 2009, the Maharashtra ATS officially denied that Col Purohit had supplied RDX for Samjhauta. This was how the Samjhauta focus -- later the blame -- shifted from the LeT and the SIMI to Purohit and via Purohit on to Saffron. The Maharashtra ATSâ€™ attempt to link Malegaon 2008 to Samjhauta, which shifted the focus away from the LeT on to Purohit, needs to be probed particularly given Dawood Ibrahimâ€™s deep influence on Maharashtra Police.

If Shinde is telling the truth, then the United Nations Security Council and the US Treasury Department are fabricating charges against Qasmani, Dawood and the LeT; Faiza Outallah and The Washington Post are telling lies to fix the LeT and Pakistan; the SIMI officialsâ€™ narco evidence is fabricated; and Rehman Mallikâ€™s confession about Pakistani involvement is false. Can it be more ridiculous? It is clearly the lies of Shinde, the vote bank politician versus all neutral evidence. If this was how the Samjhauta probe was perverted, in the Malegaon 2006 blast the Maharashtra ATS has filed a chargesheet where the SIMI cadre had confessed to their role in the blast. But the CBI is procuring confessions to exonerate them and implicate others, Hindus in the case. So Malegaon 2006, is becoming a case of confession vs confession! In Malegaon 2008 blasts, Col Purohit and his associates have been charged and the evidence submitted in the Court shows that the accused in the Malegaon 2008 case were planning to assassinate RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar for taking money from the ISI! [Outlook 19.7.2010] How could the RSS which is the target of the conspiracy itself be the conspirator? Does Shinde know what he is talking?

QED: Shinde now has a good companion in his mission against the RSS in Hafeez Saeed, boss of the global terror outfit LeT. Can a Home Minister tell more deadly lies against his own countryâ€™s interests, all for just a few million votes?

Click to expand...

I remember even 26/11 was ready to painted as saffron terror, by this govt. pure BS

Swami Aseemanand, accused in the blasts in the Samjhauta Express, Hyderabad Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Dargah, has alleged that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had sanctioned these attacks, reported a magazine.
NIA sources say during probe Aseemanand did not name any senior RSS leader.

Aseemanand, in a series of interviews to The Caravan, claimed that the attacks on the Samjhauta Express, Hyderabad's Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Dargah, and the blasts in Malegaon in 2006 and 2008, were cleared by the highest levels of the RSS.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) rubbishes Aseemanand's allegations against Bhagwat by saying that it is a bundle of lies.

Aseemanand's lawyer also rejected the Caravan report and denied that the interview ever took place.

Mohan Bhagwat, the current RSS chief, had sanctioned the Hindu terror conspiracy that included the blasts in Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Sharif. This was what Aseemanand, prime accused in all three cases, has allegedly claimed in an interview to The Caravan magazine.

â€œIt is important that it be done. But you should not link it to the Sangh,â€ Bhagwat, who was then the RSS general secretary, had told him, Aseemanand claimed.

However, Aseemanandâ€™s lawyer JS Rana on Wednesday issued a statement categorically stating that the contents of the article was a bundle of lies.

Rana has also said that his client denies having given any such interview and threatened to take legal action against the magazine and its correspondent if they failed to prove the truth of the allegations against Aseemanand.

This was the first time Bhagwatâ€™s name came up in relation to the Hindu terror conspiracy. The interview, the magazine said in a statement, was recorded in four instalments over two years from Ambala jail, where Assemanand is lodged.

The RSS was quick to refute the claim. â€œIt is a concocted interview and as per our information, Swami Aseemanand will issue a denial on Thursday in this regard,â€ said RSS spokesperson Manmohan Vaidya.

Truth or lies....whatever aseemanand revealed has been already known prior to his arrest and so far nothing has been proved on the contrary. Instead of crying foul, BJP supporters should come out with proofs debunking whatever is in the media. Only then you can say something is false. Or else....you know the drill.

NEW DELHI: While a news magazine has claimed to have taped interviews of Samjhauta blast accused Aseemanand revealing that the blasts had Mohan Bhagwat's blessings, this is not the first time the RSS chief has found himself in saffron terror crosshairs.

Investigations by Maharashtra ATS earlier revealed that Bhagwat was actually one of the targets of the saffron terror brigade led by slain RSS pracharak Sunil Joshi. Even Maharashtra home minister R R Patil has admitted as much in the state assembly.

After the arrest of a host of saffron terror accused including Pragya Singh Thakur, Lt Col Srikant Prasad Purohit and Dayanand Pandey (who were all associated with right-wing organization Abhinav Bharat), investigations revealed that some of the accused were not happy with Bhagwat leading the RSS and had planned to kill him and another RSS leader Indresh Kumar while on a visit to Pune. Kumar's name too cropped up several times during investigations as a conspirator but he was never charged by any agency.

The planned killings, a report prepared and submitted with the state home ministry then said, were masterminded by S Apte, a 70-year-old Pune-based RSS worker, along with Pandey, Major (retd) Ramesh Upadhyay and others. The ATS had found that Apte and Pandey had approached Purohit for help in executing the plan. Apte also paid him Rs 10 lakh following which a 9mm gun had been arranged.

In April 2010, R R Patil had told the state assembly that though there was no direct information about a plot to murder Bhagwat, Maharashtra police had tapes of conversation among the accused, in which they made derogatory remarks about Bhagwat. "They said he was incapable of carrying the Hindutva agenda forward. He had risen in the ranks without any capabilities... There was bitterness about Bhagwat.'' Patil added that the accused had discussed a chemical that if put in footwear would kill a man within three days.

Months later, Malegaon blasts accused Samir Kulkarni had written to Bombay High Court citing statements of two witnesses attached in the charge-sheet filed by ATS in the case that the plot to kill Bhagwat must be investigated. He wrote that statements of witness number 55, Capt Nitin Joshi, and witness number 61, Shri Sham Apte, revealed a plot to assassinate Bhagwat and one Indresh Kumar.

A news magazine has claimed that it met Aseemanand several times in jail and conducted his interview during which he said that Bhagwat had prior knowledge of all the saffron blasts and gave his blessings for it. Aseemanand's lawyer J S Rana, however, categorically denied the allegations and called the interview concocted.

"Aseemanand has said he never gave any such statement implicating Bhagwat. And if this was true, why does it not figure in the confessional statements that CBI and NIA extracted out of him. This is all a political conspiracy," Rana told TOI.

RSS leader Ram Madhav said, "A lot of questions have been raised about the veracity of this interview. The veracity of the audio that has surfaced is also questionable." Dismissing the report, RSS ideologue M G Vaidya said Congress will not benefit by this "false propaganda". "Since elections are round the corner many such things will crop up. Authenticity of the interview and whether Aseemanand has said these things or not have to be ascertained," he said.

Senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said, "Congress sponsored exercise. They (Congress) know they have no answer on burning issues of the nation -- price rise, corruption, sense of insecurity. Therefore, this is another diversionary tactic. Now, RSS chief is sought to be targeted. We are hearing for the first time that an interview was held in a span of more than two years. Even the NIA has disowned it."

Indresh Kumar, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's seven-member national executive council, finds himself once again at the heart of a raging storm.

A Caravan magazine report alleges that Swami Aseemanand, the man charged with the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Dargah bomb blasts, claimed RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar had given these acts of terror their tacit blessing.

Indresh Kumar, who is the patron of the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, an RSS-backed organisation that actively works with Muslims, was in Uttan, Thane district, to address 180-odd delegates of the Manch.

He spoke to Rediff.com's Prasanna D Zore in this exclusive interview, conducted on December 14, 2013.

Kumar would raise his hands, like an evangelist, put them on the heads of delegates, close his eyes and read something quietly. We began by asking him about it.

What do you say when you keep your hands on people's heads? Whatever you do, they feel very happy after that!

In a way, I belong to them and they belong to me.

From that feeling, I put my hand on their heads.

Whenever I do that, my heart prays for their well-being, prays to God to show them the path of righteousness, give them light, happiness and good health.

I also pray that their love for their vatan (nation) increases many times so that they walk together with their brothers and sisters.

This is what my heart feels when I keep my hand on their heads.

Baaki woh jaante honge ki unjko kya milta hai (Ask them what they feel when I put my hand on their head).

I pray to God to bestow all His love on them.

Could you tell us about your engagement with Muslims? Since when have you opened this channel of dialogue and conversation with them, and why?

When I visited Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh for RSS work, it was only natural to come in touch with Muslims in J&K, they being in the majority in the state.

I have understood one thing very clearly -- 99 per cent of Muslims love Hindustan, their ancestral roots belong to Hinduism.

Even his language and dialect belongs to Hindustan. His culture is also Hindustani. Due to some historic reasons he changed his religion.

Changing one's religion is not akin to changing one's ancestors, castes and sub-castes, language and dialects or his loyalty.

Somewhere in the course of history he made this mistake that instead of loving one's soil and nation he started identifying himself with some other nation.

Apne main aur paraye main, Hindustani aur videshi main farak nahi kar saka (He couldn't see the difference between his own and foreigners).

Like somewhere he began associating himself with Muhammad Ghori-Mahmud Ghazni-Babur, who were invaders. An invader is an invader and must be treated like one. Somewhere he began associating himself with Babur.

When I studied some sections of Islamic religion I realised that the way these Islamic teachings were interpreted in a way that even terrorism began to be equated with jihad.

In fact, in Islam, jihad is a very social, cultural and religious concept for the purification of human beings and communities.

Toh phir yeh kya hai (Then how are these people identifying themselves with invaders?)

How can they have terror outfits named as Allah Tiger, Hizbul Mujahideen... all these terror organisations in the name of Malik (God)?

Should somebody following Hizbul Mujahideen kill others in the name of religion and nationalism or help others?

Lakoom din e koom wale e din (To follow one's religion and respect religions of other people) is what these terror organisations are not doing and misleading people in the name of religion.

I then realised that these people should be helped to interpret Islam in the proper light. The other problem is politics is being used to divide and rule people.

What we need is a policy of loving others and progressing together.

Divide and rule has not helped India progress and led to backwardness of people of this great country. They started hating each other.

This is the time to start a new experiment: Let us walk together, love each other and progress together.

Why do Muslims not trust the Sangh Parivar as much as you would want them to trust you? How are you trying to change the situation?

More than distrust, there was lack of communication between these two.

The so-called secular people, who are in fact hardliners and communal, who look upon Muslims only as vote banks, further increased this communication gap.

The Muslim Rashtriya Manch (Muslim National Front) has been successful in bridging this gap a lot.

When they saw that people from the Sangh celebrate their festivals with them in the lanes where Muslims are in a majority, they have started moving towards us.

Then they saw that whenever there are man-made or natural disasters, RSS members help people of all religions without discrimination.

They saw that when ships of two Muslim countries met with an accident, RSS people went to help, cleaned the bodies of the dead for which nations of the world felicitated the RSS too.

This made the Muslims feel there should be direct communication between the community and the Sangh.

A similar line of thinking ran through the Sangh too that politicians are only broadening the gap and increasing hatred among various Indians.

So if Muslims wanted a dialogue, we should also endeavour to have a dialogue with them.

People were entering into a dialogue on an individual basis, but there was no collective effort.

We wanted to give impetus to this two-way, collective, dialogue.

The other thing is that Muslims are very uneducated, unemployed, there is the issue of talaaq (divorce) in the community, they are trapped in the web of terrorism.

So we thought there is a need for a reformist movement to change all this among the Muslims, that too by Muslims only; a reform movement to love the country, to spread a message of brotherhood and to get rid of the ills of their society.

The other reason is we want to free the nation from the politics of hatred and division.

A moment came suddenly that both sides wanted to hold a dialogue on these issues and it opened the doors for dialogue and debate.

This dialogue has now spread to 300 districts, 22 states and has started attracting people in millions.

The result of this endeavour is no doubt heartening. This dialogue made the Muslims feel that someone was helping them sincerely, without any vested interest, to make them part of the national mainstream as equals and not as a minority.

There is a section of Indians who believe that ever since Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was named the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate, the RSS and various arms of the Sangh Parivar are showing a newfound love for Muslims. The thinking is without the support of Muslims, Modi cannot become PM.

Tis is absolutely wrong. Such thinking is based on playing dirty politics and further scaring Muslims.

Such thinking reeks of communalism, inhumanness and lack of love for the nation.

The people who believe in playing dirty politics and make their careers out of it are the chief reason for such thinking.

Yeh bahut ghatiya vicharo wale log hai (People who think that we are engaging with Muslims to enlist support of Muslims for Modi to become PM have an execrable mentality).

If their thinking is so ghatiya, toh main malik se itni hi ibadat karunga ki in par rehmat barsa aur inki ghatiya soch ko achchi soch bana de (I can only pray to God to bestow his kindness on such people and change the way they think).

This movement started in 2002 and Modi is in the line of prime ministership only for the last couple of years.

Before that, there were intense discussions happening between the Muslims and RSS throughout the country.

Not seeing any humane and national perspective in these discussions is the bad fortune of some people from the media and intelligentsia.

These people can't think good of the nation and so can't ask good questions.

Are the Muslims connecting with Narendra Modi?

We are not doing this to gain political mileage.

After the results of the recent state assembly elections, I do not know the exact figure, but I got an SMS that talked about how Muslims are associating with nationalism and the path of love, the path of truth.

And if you check the figures for these assemblies (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi) you will find out why and how Muslims voted for the path of truth.

At places where only one per cent Muslims used to vote for the BJP, they have voted anywhere between 10 and 20 per cent in favour of the party in the state elections last year.

The writing is on the wall for political parties who create divisions, buy votes, scare and entice Muslim voters: These voters have stopped trusting them.

From our side, this movement is to awaken humanity, nationalism, love and brotherhood among Indians of various faiths.

The Muslims have started seeing a ray of hope because of this movement propagated by the Muslim Rashtriya Manch.

They have realised how everybody else used them for their own interests and how we are uniting them for the national cause; how everybody else incited them and we are talking about peace and progress; how where others have spread hatred, we are teaching them the message of love.

We speak about progress and others speak about religion- and caste-based progress.

We fight for justice for everyone and they fight for justice based on religion and faith of people.

In your address to the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, you said Muslims were arrested in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and states where either the Congress or non-BJP parties are ruling. You did not mention the arrests of Muslims in Karnataka (when the BJP ruled the state) and Gujarat where they get arrested on charge of terrorism. Were you trying to give it a political colour?

You did not hear and understand properly what I was saying.

The Muslims have come to form an opinion that they face atrocities only in BJP-ruled states. I was only saying that you face these atrocities even in states where you vote en bloc for other parties.

You have politics in your mind and so you are asking me this question. Others too are victims of such politics.

But I must thank you for asking this question because my answer will correct the way you think and other people too will correct their thinking because such people feel the RSS and BJP discriminates against Muslims, who we respect not because of their religion but because they are Hindustanis.

So I tried to highlight what kind of injustices and that atrocities you face jinke aap godh main baithe hai (on whose lap you are sitting, thinking they are your saviours) for several decades.

They (the Muslims) will follow the path of truth only when somebody points out to them about who their real enemies are.

That will put paid to the fact that we discriminate against Muslims and we mean ill of them.

Irrespective of his caste or religion, one must understand that appeasement of a particular faith or caste will not be tolerated in India.

They have understood the message, but you have a problem and I think you too will try and walk on the path of truth. And through you I hope others too will see the truth and so I have answered your question.

There is a charge of terrorism against you too (Indresh Kumar has been chargesheeted by the Rajasthan Anti-Terrorism Squad in the 2007 Ajmer bomb blast) and many people see you as a 'Hindu terrorist'.

What would be your message to them and when you talk to Muslims, do they ask you about these charges?

When I was charged (in the Ajmer bomb blast case), Muslims all over the country demonstrated against their respective state governments rebuffing all such charges against me.

Muslims prayed for me in mosques, and offered chadars at dargahs.

When the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) called upon me on December 23, 2010 to talk to me, thousands of Muslims were offering namaaz in the CBI office in my support.

Can you show me any instance when Muslims showered such love and affection for so many so-called secular leaders who were arrested?

They did not show such respect even when so many Muslim leaders were arrested.

During the same time my mother passed away. When thousands gathered to pay their last respects, Muslims turned out strongly for the cremation.

They carried her body on their shoulders till the crematorium. Later, many secular and Congress leaders told me 'When such a tragedy strikes them, not even 100 people gather to offer condolence and you have Muslims not only coming from Karnataka, Kashmir, Assam, West Bengal, Gujarat and other states, but also carry her for four kilometres on their shoulders till the crematorium. We have never seen Muslims in such large numbers doing this.'

Not only that, when Muslims from India go to Mecca Sharif, they pray to Allah to punish those people who have woven a web of political conspiracy with such nefarious acts against me.

They pray for my well-being and security. I don't think such prayers were offered for any other Hindustani.

How did you feel when terror charges were levelled against you?

I thought God was testing my character to see how I fare in this exam.

I have passed through that phase by praying sincerely to God, but I was absolutely confident that this was a well-thought out plan hatched by the execrable political rulers of India.

After almost four years now, it has been proved that it is more of a political conspiracy rather than the truth.

I fervently appeal that this government (the United Progressive Alliance led by the Congress) has no moral right to keep in jail all the innocents irrespective of their religion or faith.

Those officers and politicians who cook such conspiracies should be in jail.

I appealed to the government to organise an open court, call the national and international media, call your IB (Intelligence Bureau), CBI, NIA (National Investigation Agency), state ATS chiefs, home minister and home secretary and grill me in public. We too will ask questions.

If they are investigating a matter, then give us that right too.

We will all face the mirror and let the nation decide what the truth is.

I also pleaded that the job of an investigation agency is to investigate and put forth the findings in front of the courts and governments.

Never gave interview or implicated RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in blasts: Swami Aseemanand in letter

New Delhi: A day after a magazine claimed that Swami Aseemanand had implicated RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in several terror attacks, the former has denied giving any such interview.

In a handwritten letter, Aseemanand said he never gave any interview to the magazine or implicated the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or its chief for sanctioning several recent terror attacks.

The letter has been accessed several news channels and the details have been shared on air.

While dubbing the magazine report as fabricated, Aseemanand said he was planning legal action against the publicaton.

The magazine has however stood by its report.

While Aseemanand has admitted to meeting the magazine's reporter who he said came disguised as a lawyer, he has denied giving any such interview.
"On 9th January, 2014, Leena R came to meet me in the jail. I saw her several times as a reporter in the Panchkula court. But on 9th January she came as an advocate and wanted to help me. I refused her proposal... Then she requested me to discuss social work... The story she mentioned in the article is totally false and fabricated. I will take legal action," he wrote in the letter.

As per the magazine, Aseemanand had claimed that Bhagwat sanctioned the attacks when he was the RSS general secretary. Bhagwat had specifically told Aseemanand that the attacks should not be linked to the RSS, the magazine report alleged.

The magazine had issued a press release and quoted Bhagwat as telling Aseemanand that â€œit is very important that it be done. But you should not link it to the Sanghâ€.

As per the magazine, the article was based on a series of interactions held with the blasts accused.

The magazine yesterday also released audio tapes and transcripts of the interview to prove its claim.

The Sangh has rubbished the allegations as baseless, dubbing the interview as â€œrubbish and concoctedâ€.

Sangh spokesperson Ram Madhav said â€œattempts have been made earlier also to defame the organisationâ€.
â€œThe timing gives a feeling that it is a political conspiracy. Someone is seeking political advantage by raking up this old issue,â€ Madhav said.

â€œAseemanand himself has denied making such statements both inside and outside court... the authenticity of the interview is suspected,â€ he added.

NEW DELHI: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) doesn't seem to be sharing the enthusiasm of the Congress party or the home minister over Swami Aseemanand's allegations in a magazine interview linking RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's to terror acts.

Aseemanand, in jail facing charges in terrorist strikes at Hyderabad's Mecca Masjid, Ajmer Sharif, Malegaon and on the Samjhauta Express between 2006 and 2008, purportedly told the Caravan magazine that the RSS chief had sanctioned the attacks. The disclosure carries "no evidentiary value" , a top NIA official told ET.

In fact, officials at the agency, which is investigating the so-called rightwing terror cases, are wondering why Aseemanand didn't reveal the alleged involvement of Bhagwat to a Haryana court where he is being tried. "He was free to speak whatever he wished before the court in the last two years but he has been retracting his judicial confessions and pleading innocence," the NIA official said.

"His alleged disclosures in judicial custody hence have no relevance now...the matter is more political in nature. We are in fact perplexed how a reporter could take a recorder inside the jail for the said interviews."

Caravan magazine has stood by its article and released two audio recordings of the interview, both of which can be accessed here, where Aseemanand recollects the discussion he had held with the top RSS leaders when they came to visit him in Shabari Dham, Gujarat.

Executive editor Jose has also strongly defended the post. He tweeted, "4 interviews. 9 hr 26 mint long interviews. no sting. no entrapment. genuine, meticulous, persuasive, old-school investigative journalism. Aseemanand has over 20 lawyers in 5 terror cases in 5 states. I hope TV journalists are vetting these lawyers enough. Interviews are genuine. Check our records. Check the jail register. And listen to our tapes.No entrapment/sting. We believe in the real old-fashioned methods of going to people and documents without hiding our identity."

Indresh Kumar, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's seven-member national executive council, finds himself once again at the heart of a raging storm.

A Caravan magazine report alleges that Swami Aseemanand, the man charged with the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Dargah bomb blasts, claimed RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and Indresh Kumar had given these acts of terror their tacit blessing.

Indresh Kumar, who is the patron of the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, an RSS-backed organisation that actively works with Muslims, was in Uttan, Thane district, to address 180-odd delegates of the Manch.

He spoke to Rediff.com's Prasanna D Zore in this exclusive interview, conducted on December 14, 2013.

Kumar would raise his hands, like an evangelist, put them on the heads of delegates, close his eyes and read something quietly. We began by asking him about it.

What do you say when you keep your hands on people's heads? Whatever you do, they feel very happy after that!

In a way, I belong to them and they belong to me.

From that feeling, I put my hand on their heads.

Whenever I do that, my heart prays for their well-being, prays to God to show them the path of righteousness, give them light, happiness and good health.

I also pray that their love for their vatan (nation) increases many times so that they walk together with their brothers and sisters.

This is what my heart feels when I keep my hand on their heads.

Baaki woh jaante honge ki unjko kya milta hai (Ask them what they feel when I put my hand on their head).

I pray to God to bestow all His love on them.

Could you tell us about your engagement with Muslims? Since when have you opened this channel of dialogue and conversation with them, and why?

When I visited Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh for RSS work, it was only natural to come in touch with Muslims in J&K, they being in the majority in the state.

I have understood one thing very clearly -- 99 per cent of Muslims love Hindustan, their ancestral roots belong to Hinduism.

Even his language and dialect belongs to Hindustan. His culture is also Hindustani. Due to some historic reasons he changed his religion.

Changing one's religion is not akin to changing one's ancestors, castes and sub-castes, language and dialects or his loyalty.

Somewhere in the course of history he made this mistake that instead of loving one's soil and nation he started identifying himself with some other nation.

Apne main aur paraye main, Hindustani aur videshi main farak nahi kar saka (He couldn't see the difference between his own and foreigners).

Like somewhere he began associating himself with Muhammad Ghori-Mahmud Ghazni-Babur, who were invaders. An invader is an invader and must be treated like one. Somewhere he began associating himself with Babur.

When I studied some sections of Islamic religion I realised that the way these Islamic teachings were interpreted in a way that even terrorism began to be equated with jihad.

In fact, in Islam, jihad is a very social, cultural and religious concept for the purification of human beings and communities.

Toh phir yeh kya hai (Then how are these people identifying themselves with invaders?)

How can they have terror outfits named as Allah Tiger, Hizbul Mujahideen... all these terror organisations in the name of Malik (God)?

Should somebody following Hizbul Mujahideen kill others in the name of religion and nationalism or help others?

Lakoom din e koom wale e din (To follow one's religion and respect religions of other people) is what these terror organisations are not doing and misleading people in the name of religion.

I then realised that these people should be helped to interpret Islam in the proper light. The other problem is politics is being used to divide and rule people.

What we need is a policy of loving others and progressing together.

Divide and rule has not helped India progress and led to backwardness of people of this great country. They started hating each other.

This is the time to start a new experiment: Let us walk together, love each other and progress together.

Why do Muslims not trust the Sangh Parivar as much as you would want them to trust you? How are you trying to change the situation?

More than distrust, there was lack of communication between these two.

The so-called secular people, who are in fact hardliners and communal, who look upon Muslims only as vote banks, further increased this communication gap.

The Muslim Rashtriya Manch (Muslim National Front) has been successful in bridging this gap a lot.

When they saw that people from the Sangh celebrate their festivals with them in the lanes where Muslims are in a majority, they have started moving towards us.

Then they saw that whenever there are man-made or natural disasters, RSS members help people of all religions without discrimination.

They saw that when ships of two Muslim countries met with an accident, RSS people went to help, cleaned the bodies of the dead for which nations of the world felicitated the RSS too.

This made the Muslims feel there should be direct communication between the community and the Sangh.

A similar line of thinking ran through the Sangh too that politicians are only broadening the gap and increasing hatred among various Indians.

So if Muslims wanted a dialogue, we should also endeavour to have a dialogue with them.

People were entering into a dialogue on an individual basis, but there was no collective effort.

We wanted to give impetus to this two-way, collective, dialogue.

The other thing is that Muslims are very uneducated, unemployed, there is the issue of talaaq (divorce) in the community, they are trapped in the web of terrorism.

So we thought there is a need for a reformist movement to change all this among the Muslims, that too by Muslims only; a reform movement to love the country, to spread a message of brotherhood and to get rid of the ills of their society.

The other reason is we want to free the nation from the politics of hatred and division.

A moment came suddenly that both sides wanted to hold a dialogue on these issues and it opened the doors for dialogue and debate.

This dialogue has now spread to 300 districts, 22 states and has started attracting people in millions.

The result of this endeavour is no doubt heartening. This dialogue made the Muslims feel that someone was helping them sincerely, without any vested interest, to make them part of the national mainstream as equals and not as a minority.

There is a section of Indians who believe that ever since Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was named the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate, the RSS and various arms of the Sangh Parivar are showing a newfound love for Muslims. The thinking is without the support of Muslims, Modi cannot become PM.

Tis is absolutely wrong. Such thinking is based on playing dirty politics and further scaring Muslims.

Such thinking reeks of communalism, inhumanness and lack of love for the nation.

The people who believe in playing dirty politics and make their careers out of it are the chief reason for such thinking.

Yeh bahut ghatiya vicharo wale log hai (People who think that we are engaging with Muslims to enlist support of Muslims for Modi to become PM have an execrable mentality).

If their thinking is so ghatiya, toh main malik se itni hi ibadat karunga ki in par rehmat barsa aur inki ghatiya soch ko achchi soch bana de (I can only pray to God to bestow his kindness on such people and change the way they think).

This movement started in 2002 and Modi is in the line of prime ministership only for the last couple of years.

Before that, there were intense discussions happening between the Muslims and RSS throughout the country.

Not seeing any humane and national perspective in these discussions is the bad fortune of some people from the media and intelligentsia.

These people can't think good of the nation and so can't ask good questions.

Are the Muslims connecting with Narendra Modi?

We are not doing this to gain political mileage.

After the results of the recent state assembly elections, I do not know the exact figure, but I got an SMS that talked about how Muslims are associating with nationalism and the path of love, the path of truth.

And if you check the figures for these assemblies (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi) you will find out why and how Muslims voted for the path of truth.

At places where only one per cent Muslims used to vote for the BJP, they have voted anywhere between 10 and 20 per cent in favour of the party in the state elections last year.

The writing is on the wall for political parties who create divisions, buy votes, scare and entice Muslim voters: These voters have stopped trusting them.

From our side, this movement is to awaken humanity, nationalism, love and brotherhood among Indians of various faiths.

The Muslims have started seeing a ray of hope because of this movement propagated by the Muslim Rashtriya Manch.

They have realised how everybody else used them for their own interests and how we are uniting them for the national cause; how everybody else incited them and we are talking about peace and progress; how where others have spread hatred, we are teaching them the message of love.

We speak about progress and others speak about religion- and caste-based progress.

We fight for justice for everyone and they fight for justice based on religion and faith of people.

In your address to the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, you said Muslims were arrested in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and states where either the Congress or non-BJP parties are ruling. You did not mention the arrests of Muslims in Karnataka (when the BJP ruled the state) and Gujarat where they get arrested on charge of terrorism. Were you trying to give it a political colour?

You did not hear and understand properly what I was saying.

The Muslims have come to form an opinion that they face atrocities only in BJP-ruled states. I was only saying that you face these atrocities even in states where you vote en bloc for other parties.

You have politics in your mind and so you are asking me this question. Others too are victims of such politics.

But I must thank you for asking this question because my answer will correct the way you think and other people too will correct their thinking because such people feel the RSS and BJP discriminates against Muslims, who we respect not because of their religion but because they are Hindustanis.

So I tried to highlight what kind of injustices and that atrocities you face jinke aap godh main baithe hai (on whose lap you are sitting, thinking they are your saviours) for several decades.

They (the Muslims) will follow the path of truth only when somebody points out to them about who their real enemies are.

That will put paid to the fact that we discriminate against Muslims and we mean ill of them.

Irrespective of his caste or religion, one must understand that appeasement of a particular faith or caste will not be tolerated in India.

They have understood the message, but you have a problem and I think you too will try and walk on the path of truth. And through you I hope others too will see the truth and so I have answered your question.

There is a charge of terrorism against you too (Indresh Kumar has been chargesheeted by the Rajasthan Anti-Terrorism Squad in the 2007 Ajmer bomb blast) and many people see you as a 'Hindu terrorist'.

What would be your message to them and when you talk to Muslims, do they ask you about these charges?

When I was charged (in the Ajmer bomb blast case), Muslims all over the country demonstrated against their respective state governments rebuffing all such charges against me.

Muslims prayed for me in mosques, and offered chadars at dargahs.

When the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) called upon me on December 23, 2010 to talk to me, thousands of Muslims were offering namaaz in the CBI office in my support.

Can you show me any instance when Muslims showered such love and affection for so many so-called secular leaders who were arrested?

They did not show such respect even when so many Muslim leaders were arrested.

During the same time my mother passed away. When thousands gathered to pay their last respects, Muslims turned out strongly for the cremation.

They carried her body on their shoulders till the crematorium. Later, many secular and Congress leaders told me 'When such a tragedy strikes them, not even 100 people gather to offer condolence and you have Muslims not only coming from Karnataka, Kashmir, Assam, West Bengal, Gujarat and other states, but also carry her for four kilometres on their shoulders till the crematorium. We have never seen Muslims in such large numbers doing this.'

Not only that, when Muslims from India go to Mecca Sharif, they pray to Allah to punish those people who have woven a web of political conspiracy with such nefarious acts against me.

They pray for my well-being and security. I don't think such prayers were offered for any other Hindustani.

How did you feel when terror charges were levelled against you?

I thought God was testing my character to see how I fare in this exam.

I have passed through that phase by praying sincerely to God, but I was absolutely confident that this was a well-thought out plan hatched by the execrable political rulers of India.

After almost four years now, it has been proved that it is more of a political conspiracy rather than the truth.

I fervently appeal that this government (the United Progressive Alliance led by the Congress) has no moral right to keep in jail all the innocents irrespective of their religion or faith.

Those officers and politicians who cook such conspiracies should be in jail.

I appealed to the government to organise an open court, call the national and international media, call your IB (Intelligence Bureau), CBI, NIA (National Investigation Agency), state ATS chiefs, home minister and home secretary and grill me in public. We too will ask questions.

If they are investigating a matter, then give us that right too.

We will all face the mirror and let the nation decide what the truth is.

I also pleaded that the job of an investigation agency is to investigate and put forth the findings in front of the courts and governments.